How to Excel in Coding with Just 8GB of RAM

Chances are, you are not rich.

Well neither am I, which means we must deal with the struggle of coding on low-end hardware.

We don’t have fast computers to write code without worrying about applications crashing, the OS freezing, and so on.

TL;DR, Coding on bad hardware is bad. But I have discovered some smart techniques to help you squeeze the most out of your hardware, and actually make your coding experience more productive than you thought could be possible.

And no, I won’t give you generic advice like:

“Enable performance mode!”

Or

“Use fewer browser tabs!”

Because we all know this does absolutely nothing and hinders our productivity.

Instead, I will give actionable suggestions for anyone with slow hardware to make your coding experience great again.

So without further ado… Let’s get started.

Who Will Benefit From This Article?

I could say this advice will work for absolutely everyone, and that would be false.

What I can say is my advice will work for the majority of software developers, but lets clarify who will not benefit from this article first:

1. Machine Learning/Data Science Developers
2. 3D Game Developers
3. VR Developers
4. General Enterprise Software Developers

And anything else that requires multiple development servers, Kubernetes, graphically intensive app development and so on.

Now lets put my own setup into perspective: I have an 8GB RAM computer and I am a full stack web developer using Next.js.

I am able to run a development server for a medium-large scale application while multitasking 10+ tabs on my browser with zero issues.

How did I do this? Let's find out.

Switching to Linux

A lot of people may resent this, but switching to linux had a massive reduction in RAM usage.

To visualize this, I ran an identical development server on both Windows 11 and Linux Mint and here is the difference in RAM usage:

We see a difference of 26% when running a local development server.

Now that’s a crazy difference. We could even run a second server and still have better performance than Windows!

I would also compare the performance with Mac, but I am too poor to afford one. If you own a Mac, please try this test and let me know the results in the comments. 😉

Switching to Vivaldi Browser

Vivaldi is a lesser known yet powerful browser when it comes to RAM usage.

If you take Vivaldi at face value, it actually performs similar to most web browsers.

However, there is a cool trick you can do with Vivaldi, which is to Hibernate Tabs on demand.

With a single keybind press, you can hibernate every single tab in your workspace.

It’s like an emergency switch you can use to prevent your hardware from crashing due to excessive RAM usage.

This can potentially reduce your RAM usage by 20-30% depending on how many tabs you have open.

Here is a before and after of me hibernating 8 notion tabs:

From this we can see a 14% drop in memory usage.

Sweet.

And the fact that we can do this on demand makes Vivaldi an essential tool to optimize your RAM.

Conclusion

I hope you learned a lot from this article.

My purpose with this article is to make you reach your potential as a programmer, even if it seems like your hardware is letting you down.

If you enjoyed this article, please make sure to Subscribe, Clap, Comment and Connect with me today! 🌐

Want to ship code like a hacker? Visit Next Inject today!