Had a laptop purchased in December 2024 with 16 GB of RAM. Running a single VS Code instance and Edge with maybe 10 tabs consumed almost 100% of the RAM. Doing any actual development work required me to upgrade to 64 gigs of RAM. Thankfully it required DDR4 SODIMMs and I had two lying around from a recently deceased Mini PC.

I've always found that it's pretty amazing how much effective speed can be gained by thinking about your memory usage and doing things that "don't make sense", such as leaving requests compressed in memory. Even re-compressing them after decryption is "obviously" less efficient than not doing so ... except it' can be faster, even on servers with 192GB ram.

Half the articles on Go vs Java also make this point. "We're so much easier on memory usage than Java's Object and that alone gives us a XX% speed boost".

It also can become an extra layer of protection against thrashing when overloaded.

I wish people put more attention into this.

I am in this bucket too. MSSQL + VS + tested Server + tested Client on 16GB + Win11 will just choke MSSQL server into constant timeouts. But if I will offload MSSQL onto another computer everything works just fine.