alt Hacker NewsI've been pretty happy with my M1-2 devices like most posters here seem to say, but I don't have the same level of core stability while doing dev work. Am I doing something wrong with my workloads?
- Orbstack, but just for one containerised service - Laravel Herd for app environments, so all native services instead of containers with bigger VM overhead - Brave browser, profile for work and personal - PHPStorm (quite a hog on RAM) - Now agents in the mix
Had an M1 Pro 8GB but I found 8 to really not be enough. M2 Air 16GB has been a much better sweet spot, albeit it feels like the battery life on it is worse than M1. I've recently started trying to use Zed more and more as my editor instead of PHPStorm and things feel mostly stable, but I still feel like a beefier machine would be good for work purposes.
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I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I struggle with similar workloads on 32GB RAM. Compute isn't the issue, once I have a JetBrains IDE open, a dev environment, some browser tabs, Claude, and a bunch of other crap Electron apps I need the machine is already swapping quite a bit.
I have found that my M5pro gets unstable when I really stress it's memory use. I think that with 8 or 16GB you are going to hit this quite a lot more than I do with 48GB.
Years ago there were frequent crashes (kernel panics) i could directly relate to IntelliJ (PHPStorm, etc), so it might sound dull but upgrading to the latest versions is the first thing I’d check. In this case even a manual check on their website instead of relying on the auto updater to work.
My big issue with the M1 generation is the lack of more E-cores, which get assigned a lot of the OS background tasks. When working at the top of the RAM limit, I'd notice issues around lag to the point that I started looking at CPU stats and found those two measly e-cores completely maxed out for hours on end. Occasionally a crash, though that could be RAM related rather than CPU.
A bit of googling around seems to point that architecture as somewhat of a problem for others, and might be why Apple quickly moved to put more e-cores on the later generations.
Something to consider. Never managed to get proper distinct confirmation that this was the problem, but a (corporate) laptop upgrade did get me out of this pickle.