How much RAM does your PC or VPC have? The computer I remote into is in the process of being switched from a physical desktop with 16 G RAM, to a new virtual PC that initially has only 8G, which I'm fussing about. My home laptop, which I barely use for dev stuff any more, has 32, which I thought was a pretty standard minimum for a professional dev machine. To be clear, the remote machine won't be running any CF or DB servers, just IDEA for code work, SSMS for db stuff, AccuRev, Beyond Compare, lots of browser tabs, and a bit of other stuff. What are other folks using?

An iPad has a minimum of 8GB RAM so that seems a bit mean for a work machine especially if it's Windows (so not as hardware optimised as Apple stuff is)

My dev and prod have 64.

I'm running 40GB but that is running a full stack which is what eats most of the RAM

32GB but I'm running a full stack as well. 8GB sounds low, but I don't think you'd need more than 16GB given the workload specified.

Best not to have to worry about it. They run better than 95% of the systems I have to deal with.

Although you don't actually state it I'm assuming you're using Windows. 8GB for a windows machine is fine if it's the typical office user but for a dev box you'll soon hit the limit and start swapping so 16GB is probably better. As someone who has my own virtualization cluster in a datacenter with over 180 VMs running, I understand the administrators reluctance to dole out more RAM initially. Disk and CPU can be over provisioned but RAM is a limited resource and once provisioned (on most hypervisor platforms) cannot be over provisioned to another VM. Plus the larger the RAM allocation on a VM the longer it takes to snapshot the VM and live migrate the VM to another host. I hope that helps.

I agree with everything so far. I've asked for more RAM, we'll see. @Peter Amiri Yes I understand that RAM is scarce, but so is developer time, and I'd prefer not to be annoyed by this too!

They will give you 8 GB on the virtual PC and send you a 8Gb module in the post

@Dave Merrill I completely agree with you. The point I was trying to make was simply, since this is a VM. They can start by giving you 8GB, then you can open up your suite of tools and start working, then you can show them how your VM is trashing and unresponsive, then since this is a VM, they can give it more RAM, and test and repeat. There might be a sweet spot like 10GB, or 14GB where you are okay. But typically if you have to prove your need you may have to go through several iterations to get to where you want to be. Oh by the way, I realized I didn't answer your original question. I use 64GB in my MacBook Pro.

I have 32GB on my dell laptop with win11, which has been good so far

@Peter Amiri And I didn't answer your question either, it's Windows 10 Enterprise. I've asked we'll see how it goes.

Just out of curiosity, is this a HyperV environment or VMWare or KVM? If HyperV Win10 and Win11 are better at recognizing that they are running in a VM and trying to optimize for disk access a little better. VMWare and KVM have drivers but the Windows OS doesn't do as good a job to optimize for it in my opinion.

16GB on my Win10 Ent workstation and it has been just fine for development work (VScode, many browsers open, MSSQL tools, etc). The database and web servers exist on separate hardware.

VMWare here.

That would be all the more reason to get more RAM so the VM doesn't have to use virtual memory and swap files and get the slower disk latency involved.

Understood, I've submitted the request.

Working in VM is hard. Typing has that little lag, annoying lags when alt-tab from editor to ediotr. Like repairing windows on mom's 10 years old laptop, but without cake. :)