It's more than sufficient, but devops needs you to run the whole cluster on your computer.

That seems an even sadder commentary about the state of affairs if you need to run an entire cluster on a regular basis. The whole point of microservices was supposed to be that you didn’t need huge monoliths.

Does this really surprise anyone lol

Why “of all things”? I think it’s a commentary on the general demand of professional computing, and there’s nothing inherent to web dev that would exempt it from that. I would expect to need—or at least benefit greatly from having—more than 24 GB RAM doing development for almost any target environment.

>Why “of all things”?

Pardon my French, but: Because it's a fucking website, not a nonlinear video editor or a large language model. It's supposed run on low-end android devices, my aunt's 3 year old iPad, and the old thinkpad I've got in the basement, not just on my M2 machine.

What on earth does a web developer need all that memory for, beside the comically bloated Chrome browser and all the stupid Electron apps people shit out these days?

You end up needing 32 GB or more because without it you can't run Chrome, Slack, and VS Code on the same machine, because Electron is hot garbage.

> Because it's a fucking website

You seem to be aware that web developers need to use, pardon my French in kind, fucking tools to develop a fucking website. The tools—in many cases the very same tools used by non-web developers—don’t magically become lighter weight just because the end product ought to be. Web developers don’t need those tools any less than non-web developers. Chrome (or equivalent) and Slack (or equivalent) and basically any IDE are just as prevalent in many non-web development workflows, and account for just as much demand for resources for those developers.

In what other profession would it be a “sad commentary” that the resources needed to do one’s job differ from the resources needed by the product of that job?

What I'm getting at is: unlike running LLMs, 3D modeling, rendering 8K video, or similar tasks, there's nothing inherent to working with html and javascript that demands such huge amounts of memory. Editing a few hundred (even a few thousand) lines of code is not a memory-intensive task.

The only reason we are in this current sorry state of affairs is because They(tm) have decided that the proper way to deploy apps is to ship it atop an entire Chrome instance, itself being a notorious resource hog.

The web sucks. Desktop apps are now just web apps, and they also suck.

It didn't have to be this way.

Nearly every part of a web page must run on the end user's hardware.

I would expect someone working on 3D animation or CAD software to require significantly more resources than a web developer.

I have 24GB, it doesn’t web dev work just fine, probably be ok with 16 too.

I have 8GB, it does web dev work just fine.

I have 32 gigs of ram just to browse the internet and maybe fiddle with some other things.

I'm using 26 at the moment with no virtual machines running.

Your computer is designed to use a good chunk of the RAM in the background, to accelerate tasks that frankly do not need acceleration (because why not). I would expect, if you closed all your apps, you'd still see Windows (I assume this is Windows – Windows does it the most) using 16gb. How could it do this? How is Windows usable on computers with 4gb of RAM? Well it doesn't need to use all this RAM, it just does it because it can.

And the same thing goes in reverse. I'm frequently actually using 16gb of RAM or so, but the 8gb handles it fine. How? RAM Compression and Swapping. The Calendar app I have not used in the past 8 hours does not need to be using RAM, so it gets sent to swap (storage). The only way to notice this is that refocusing the app takes ~0.1 (~0.3 worst case) longer.

(Also, in my experience macOS and to a lesser extent linux is much better at compression than windows)

Sad but also kinda hilarious