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by emilecantin 1929 days ago
It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual suspects with Slack, Skype (yes), Finder, etc.

Honestly, I could probably do with 16GB right now, but I'm planning on keeping this machine for at least 5 years; it was worth the few hundred bucks extra to future-proof it.
2 comments
foldr 1929 days ago
Browsers will quickly eat up all of your available RAM if you open enough tabs. The thing is, if you had less RAM, they'd be keeping fewer tabs alive in RAM. So you can't really infer from "I'm using X amount of RAM now" to "I need at least X amount of RAM". If you upgraded to 64GB you'd probably end up 'using' a lot more than 28GB for the exact same workflow.
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mixmastamyk 1929 days ago
Simply open a blank page, quit the browser and restart it. Now, only load the two or three page/sites you really need. Simple as that to bring mem use under 500MB, with Firefox at least. Repeat this once a day.

I personally close my browser at night and load it in the morning.

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emilecantin 1929 days ago
Oh yeah, definitely! I was just RAM-constrained on my previous machine (8GB) when running Docker workloads, so I made sure to future-proof this one.
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skohan 1929 days ago
re. the "usual suspects", I got an M1 air late last year, and I've decided to keep it completely separate from my work laptop, so all it has installed is basically firefox, a couple of code editors, and whatever came with it. It absolutely screams compared to my other laptop, but I wonder how much of that is the M1 processor, and how much of it is because I don't have all this garbage running all the time.
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