Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#51

Post by draven » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

flurdy wrote: post #14

GrinningFool wrote: post #7

8GB max RAM kind of rules it out for any heavy duty development.

:( 8GB rules out me.Fitting inside that with constant swap file writes will kill the SSD quickly. 16GB is fine for now but it wont be long beofer I need to look for 32GB. Multiple VMs, Docker clusters with several memory heavy JVM apps (Scala), too many browser tabs, etc. just don't play nice with 8GB anymore. A nearly $2K laptop aimed at developers with 8GB is a bit of a joke to be honest. Shame, as otherwise it see…

Honest question: why run all that stuff locally? It looks like you're looking for a portable server.

I'm working on a Macbook Pro w/ 16Gb of ram but I'm not doing anything I couldn't do on a machine with 8 or even 4 Gb of ram (replacing Intellij w/ Emacs, as I'm planning to do anyway.)

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#52

Post by kbenson » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

I think the usual response is virtual hosts. On Mac, run windows or linux, on Windows, run linux, etc.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#53

Post by maccard » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

grayfox wrote: post #31

maccard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From yesterday: I compile a large C++ code base in work, and a full rebuild takes about 15 minutes on my 40 core, 32GB ram desktop, and uses almost 20GB of RAM while doing so.

That's... intense. An extreme case, for sure. You likely would be remoting into this machine to compile this work, in any scenario involving you working on a mobile device. With that being said, 16GB would preclude you, too. Like the fellow above, still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine. A pixel2 with 8GB is a rocket ship, for my general full-stackery and…

> still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine.

If I'm only remoting into the machine, then it doesn't count as a development machine. I could remote in from a machine running a P4 with 512MB ram by that logic.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#54

Post by davidw » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

I'm guessing massive Java projects.

More memory is always good, but I'm pretty good with 8 for the Erlang and Ruby on Rails hacking that I do.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#55

Post by sandGorgon » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

cdnsteve wrote: post #13

sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

get them from here - http://www.unixstickers.com/stickers/linux-keyboard-stickers

wow these exist, amazing!

you should join us over at the Thinkpad gang... you know, with coreboot and laptops that can actually go to the moon ;)

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#56

Post by stevebot » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

yes, its usually IDE's emulator's for me. Put xCode and Android Studio on there and run an emulator.

Also, I've had a similar experience running Visual Studio + SQL Server.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#57

Post by yulaow » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

Virtual machines and especially smartphone/tablet emulators can really be voracious about ram. Also some ides with big projects/solutions

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#58

Post by dijit » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

ulfw wrote: post #18

djhworld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Chrome takes up at least 2.5GB on my Mac, 8GB is a complete joke

Time to get rid of Chrome then.

the alternative is firefox, and that's just as bad.

the issue isn't necessarily chrome, chromes only crime is correctly jailing tabs.

the issue is in certain sites adding an absolute metric tonne of javascript and javascript libraries.

my previous workplace had over 10MB of javascript on the home page alone, new devs reduced it to 1.5MB or so, but that's _still insane_.

and a 1.5MB download isn't 1.5MB in memory, it's much more. we need to tone down the "richness' of our sites.. your users aren't _only_ using _your_ site!

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#59

Post by Alupis » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

ulfw wrote: post #18

djhworld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Chrome takes up at least 2.5GB on my Mac, 8GB is a complete joke

Time to get rid of Chrome then.

I think it's safe to say, any browser with 50-80+ tabs open will gobble up ram. Especially if it does tab-process isolation (each tab having it's own memory space, etc...)

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#60

Post by xtrumanx » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 3:53 PM UTC

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

Perhaps they're working with a large data set? I've 4gb on my office PC and was trying to create a CSV of millions of records and got an OutOfMemoryException from my app.