Max_P, 1 year ago

RAM is the kind of thing you’re better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.

The thing with RAM is that it’s easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then there’s one thing you temporarily need a bit more and you’re screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. I’ve compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.

Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time it’s fine, because it’s a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.

RAM is cheap enough these days it’s nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.