this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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but
????
If their idea of distraction-free requires 64GB of RAM, they're pretty lost as a company.
640K ought to be enough for anyone
Why do developers need 64GB+ RAM on their computers? Maybe I’m biased as a Ruby on Rails web application developer but I’m happily squeaking by on just 8GB RAM. Maybe they’re developing with the memory-hungry VS Code?
I thought it was the gamers who needed tons of RAM.
Its AI.
8 GB woyldn't be nearly enough to run a large enterprise server while also running all my other apps in the background. At work I use a MacBook with 48 GB of RAM and the memory pressure regularly goes into yellow.
Visual Studio, VS Code, WSL2, docker containers, SQL Server + SSMS, MS Teams, ...
Usually all at the same time. Not everyone is doing just web dev.
Teams, Visual Studio, VS Code are trash, they leak memory like no other
WSL2 is hilarious, just run Linux/UNIX?
SQL Server and SSMS are trash
I run Docker quite a bit but if you’re actually writing the containers efficiently it shouldn’t be sucking down ~64GB of RAM. But I’ve also seen how people shovel things like Java, log rotation, etc. into those containers because they act like it’s a 1994 VPS.
Not everyone does the same development process as you.
And I’m sure we all work at places that allow us to change the entire tech stack and switch away from teams /s
Be realistic, there are many reasons you need all of these things and more. Why are you trashing other people so much?
This is on my work PC, I can't just switch there (:
For .NET development Visual Studio and Rider are the only decent options, everything else is "trash". Teams is the company communication tool (besides Outlook).
And we run SQL Servers in Azure, PostgreSQL would cost the same (but I'd love to switch to it myself).
You don't need 64 GB of RAM, I was happy with 48 GB too, but the headroom is nice. 32 GB would be borderline for my work though, especially as I often have two heavy backend services open (2x Visual Studio) plus a Python project for automated tests (VS Code).
VS has an option that I think was called Launch With, or something like that, so you can run two services together.
Aspire also let's you do this more easily.
Just don't use Teams. There's Zulip, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, even Matrix and XMPP.
People don't choose Teams, it's forced on them by executives that rather save a little licensing money rather than have an effective communication tool. The entire MS stack is basically kept alive by convincing corporations to shove it down the throats of their employees. The only people I ever hear say anything nice about MS products are system admins that like the centralized way you can lock down and micromanage Windows instances.
In Windows when you run a docker container a full Linux VM is run, so it uses gigabytes of memory
.
When you work on backend services you have a local DB running 24/7. Changes don't go onto the actual dev environment until locally tested, or you might just break things for 50 other people.
I always build against a local DB?
For our desktop / LAN software the DB will always be local.
For web, it's easier since I'm likely to burn the DB down over and over during early development / prototyping. But I'm not using cloud hosted DB even in production, and don't expose Postgres outside the DB server, so I find it easier to work on this way.
EDIT: I also think that a default installation of VS includes SQL Server. I don't use it, so always have to adjust the installation and remove all of those bits, but I also have complete control of my environment. I could see an IT department just doing a stock VS installation with the required workloads.
I could totally see that for the web stuff where I only make changes a couple of times a year. Usually when working on those I just delete the local DB before I start to keep it clean, but spinning up a new copy would be more efficient.
For our desktop apps / server Postgres is always installed locally on the machine, so keeping it there mirrors "production".
I spent most of my time working on those apps and services, or working on the Android client (or both at the same time when a feature requires that both change), and often on a copy of actual customer data as we do a lot of custom work for clients.
Yeah, that’s exactly the process- while you are building out a feature it hits a local DB and once it’s ready to integrate you push it to a shared environment.
If you break dev, coworkers be mad
Oh my god. Do people really live like this? I'm going to be sick...
Sometimes you use big datasets. I needed 64GB (well, I only needed more than 32 to be fair, but 5-6 years ago it wasn't that expensive) to figure out a bug in data going over 32bits number of indices on a gpu.
But usually 32GB has been largely enough for most stuff, I even only have 16 on my laptop but I don't do large stuff any more.
I develop in containers, which means I don't have to install dependencies on my host.
While it's overhead, it's never that massive.
Sure things like Codium and all the tooling takes up a lot of memory... I don't think I've seen over 10gb of "dev related" memory.
I feel like people are significantly desensitized about how much data 1GB actually is.
I've worked on large C++ applications and it's worth having a beefy machine. Each source file can be compiled in parallel so you save time by having a ton of CPU cores and memory.
Yeah for most projects the only time you need a workstation-class machine is to cut down on compile times. Every time you make a change and run you have to compile; a process you do possibly hundreds of times per day benefits immensely from even being just 1-2 seconds faster
It's also useful if you have a lot of unit tests that can be run in parallel.
I do use quite a bit, but I also do a lot of different things. Compiling code, running docker containers, local web servers, an android emulator, slack, browser tabs for Jira/confluence/figma/etc., all adds up pretty quick.
8GB is definitely nowhere near enough, at least for what I need to do.
Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can't actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.
My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.
Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn't mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.
I build windows software, so need Windows and VS. I keep my entire development environment in a virtual machine. I also have a couple of other VMs for client isolation, clean installation testing, etc.
So having that much memory allows me to run more than one virtual machine at a time, and keep enough reserve for my actual desktop.
It was also my first rebuild in over 12 years, and RAM prices hadn't gone stupid yet, so I figured I'd drop a few more $ and build another decade+ future proof machine.
They probably try to keep the normal users out, so that their ~~spy-ware infested~~ normal version is still the default for most of the users.
Either that or they didn't remove the crud but replaced it with AI crud that needs the RAM.
I don't get it either.
If they said "requires a beefy dGPU or one of the handful of high-bandwidth APUs" that feels like it would make more sense than just 64G RAM. I thought most models weren't optimized to run on a CPU even with gobs of RAM.
And plenty of firms don't ship their devs 64G machines, especially in ghe current RAM crunch. Mine sent me a 16G machine in like 2023 and only replaced it with 32 on request because Win11+Docker were heavier than the old Win10/external server workflow.