For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.
Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.
I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.
Sure it is bloated, but it is the stack we have for local development
Of course, being developer laptops, they all come with 16 gigs of RAM. In contrast, the remote VMs where we do all of the actual work are limited to 4GiB unless we get manager and IT approval for more.
If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.
Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.
I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.
Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).
While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.
I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.
It's a life of luxury, I tell you.
In enterprise, we get shared servers with constant connection issues, performance problems, and full disks.
Alternatively we can use Windows VMs in Azure, with network attached storage where "git log" can take a full minute. And that's apparently the strategic solution.
Not to mention that in Azure 8 CPUs gets you four physical cores of a previous gen server CPU. To anyone working with 4 CPUs or 2 physical cores: good luck.
A really shame as running local docker/podman for postges was fine when you just ran the commands.
Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.
It doesn’t work when you’re developing on a large database, since it won’t fit. Database (and data warehouse) development has been held back from modern practices just for this reason.
our company just went with the "server in the basement" approach, with every employee having a user account (no VM or docker separation, just normal file permissions). Sure, sounds like the 80s, but it works rearly well. Remote access with wireguard, uptime similar or better than cloud, sharing the same beefy CPUs works well and gives good utilization. Running jobs that need hundreds of GB of RAM isn't an issue as long as you respect other's needs too dont hog the RAM all day. And in amortized costs per employee its dirt cheap. I only wish we had more GPUs.
And if you are lucky, the content will still be there the next time.
This assumption is wrong. I compile stuff directly on my laptop, and so do a lot of other people.
Also, even if nobody ran compilers locally, there is still stuff like rustc, clangd, etc. which take lots of RAM.
Why do you assume that? Its nice to do things locally sometimes. Maybe even while having a browser open. It doesn't take much to go over 8gb.
Large corp gotta large corp?
My guess is that providing the ability to pull containers means you can run code that they haven't explicitly given permission for, and the laptop scanning tools can't hijack them?
It’s kind of humorous that everyone interpreted the comment as complaining about Chrome. For all I know, it’s justified in using that much memory, or it’s the crappy websites I’m required to use for work with absurdly large heaps.
I really just meant that at least for work I need more than 8GB of RAM.