While I don't disagree that 8GB isn't much for a developer machine these days I do also think your claim is a little exaggerated. I certainly don't have any issues running a couple of intelliJ instances + Chrome with at least a dozen tabs open (seriously; I'm terrible for leaving tabs open).
What I find kills my machine is trying to run Chrome and Firefox concurrently. Particularly if I still have IntelliJ open.
I do most of my work on a laptop with 4GiB of memory (manufactured in 2009). Probably the last time I did anything dev related that meaningfully stressed the machine was when I decided to give android studio a shot.
Just sitting there, with nothing else open, the machine was completely unusable.
I cannot recall anything else I have done with the machine in it's lifetime that's been a real problem.
This includes running firefox and chromium concurrently, plus a couple virtual machines .
Like always when people start comparing system performance, there are so many variables at play (CPU make / model / age / cache / n cores, bus speed, RAM type, OS / distro / package versions / compiled flags, swap space, running daemons / services or other background processes, number of browser tabs and even the specific sites left open, etc etc)....
But for me it's the Flash plugin container for Firefox that really does the damage when it comes to concurrency. A few Firefox tabs open running YouTube (or another video streaming service) and my fan already starts spinning up louder than a revving motorbike. If I have much more open aside Firefox then the system will just lock up without warning. I suspect Flash is thrashing both CPU and RAM though but it's consistent enough behaviour that I tend to avoid it rather than investing time debugging and fixing (though since it is Flash that kills it, I suspect any such "fix" would just be altering the behaviour of the softwares end user (ie me) anyway).
>with at least a dozen tabs open (seriously; I'm terrible for leaving tabs open).
Come back when you have 150 tabs open. Anyways, somewhere around 200 across 4 windows is where i start seeing about 10GB ram used, with os and other apps.
RAM never seems to be much of an issue unless im abusing things; its cpu/disk that kills me, particularly when some background process goes out of control.
I'm horrible about tabs too. But I mostly use it as a "I'll use this page again in a moment". Often that's true, but often I also just end up leaving it around.
My solution was the OneTab extension for Chrome. It gives you a button to click to close all tabs (with some ways of marking exceptions), and adds them to a page, so you won't lose them. It groups it by date, from newest to oldest. It makes it easy to come back to the things I left in tabs "in case", while keeping the tab count down.
In effect I find I come back to quite few of them, but knowing I can makes it a lot easier mentally to press that button.
(And now I'm off to do just that before doing some work)
Been there, done that. I was constantly losing documents I wanted saved because the browser would crash etc. So then I realised my behavior was counterproductive and thus since employed a more sane approach to tab usage.
Honestly; having more than a dozen tabs open doesn't make you a hero. It just makes your life a little less convenient.
CPU is rarely an issue for me, but disks are a constant source of annoyance.
The turning point for me was when I got a new PC at home that has an SSD. I used to think people exaggerated the benefits of SSDs, or that they were just very impatient. ... Now I am spoiled.
