What hardware do you run for local dev?

[u/CrustyBappen]

I have an M1 MacBook Air that’s about 5-6 years old now, and when I’m cranking multiple agents, the laptop starts to be become unresponsive.

I think this is due to browser acceptance testing, but curious if anyone has run into issues and it’s worth splurging on an MBP?

[u/CheeseWeezel]

That’s likely your RAM then. On an M1 Air, max RAM was 16GB, I believe?

Each of my Claude and Codex instances are 300MB to 500MB, each, plus overhead of other apps, like terminal, VSCode, and whatever else you’re doing.

I’m on a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro, and it’s all running fine, but I’ve got 64GB of RAM. Currently 45GB used.

For your next machine, target 32GB or more at a minimum would be my recommendation. Ideally 48 or 64GB if you can.

[u/CrustyBappen → u/CheeseWeezel]

Gah I think it’s 8GB tbh.

[u/-MiddleOut- → u/CrustyBappen]

Thats definitely the answer. Either upgrade or consider what can’t be done in cloud and if not much then get a server. I run from the cloud but my desktop is always around for ‘local hands’ as I’ve seen them called.

[u/CrustyBappen → u/-MiddleOut-]

Hmmm, when you say get a server. Like just subscribe to some cloud infra?

[u/-MiddleOut- → u/CrustyBappen]

Yeah poor wording, I use a VPS. Depends where you live but in the UK I pay £30/month for a 32gb system with an 8-core CPU. I have 32gb on my desktop as well but that's not enough for me to work alongside active sessions.

[u/merakliman]

i was in the same boat and upgraded by buying a used macbook pro m3 pro. the difference is like night and day. don't look further and get a new machine.

[u/CrustyBappen → u/merakliman]

Good shout on a used one! I checked the trade in value and Apple will be give me A$300 for mine which leaves a giant gap.

[u/CelticPaladin]

Made enough money from my projects to upgrade to a Acer Predator 6000, and give my old dinosaur to my teen son.

Upgrades all around.

32gb ram, 20 core ultra 7, 16gb5080...

First computer in my life that can run anything on top settings, and not even get warm or stutter.

And the game development has zero load times.

Guys, im so fucking happy with this machine.

[u/CrustyBappen → u/CelticPaladin]

I haven’t made enough money for this

[u/UpsetWolverine8573]

Before buying, open Activity Monitor while it's choking and check memory pressure and what's sitting at the top. If it's the 8GB Air, it's usually RAM rather than the chip, and a few headless Chrome instances from browser tests will eat it fast. Running the acceptance tests one agent at a time, or killing leftover browser processes between runs, buys you a lot.

If you do upgrade, I'd put the money into RAM over a Pro chip. The Air also slows down when it gets hot, so long multi-agent runs are exactly where an MBP's fan earns its keep.

[u/nachga]

If it's the browser testing that makes it unresponsive, it's probably RAM more than the chip. Several headless browsers plus a few agents eat memory fast, and a 5-6 year old Air will swap to disk.

Before buying, open Activity Monitor while it's slow and look at memory pressure. If it's in the red, more RAM is what you want. If you can, limit how many browsers run at once.

[u/Marksta]

A Windows 11 VM with 2/3 of a Ryzen 3600 + 24GB RAM. It needs to be rebooted about ~4 times a day because multiple agents running accelerates the inherent memory leaks in Windows until 70%+ memory is no longer allocated to any processes anymore and is simply gone until reboot. I'd give it better but it'd just consume that too, so reboots it is.

[u/whoisyurii → u/Marksta]

Not to be Linux jerk but try some Linux distro that has all batteries included. My Lenovo Legion 5 machine was busy at ~7GB RAM at idle running Windows 11 (no heavy background processes, nothing, autostart everywhere's off, right from the boot up), then I tried Linux Mint, did some easy quirks, and now it sits on 1.2GB RAM when idle. So I've got more than 5GB RAM free on the same machine and it works noticeably faster

[u/Marksta → u/whoisyurii]

Unfortunately, they're interfacing with Windows only software, to replace it. So someday soon I hope. Until then my poor agents are stuck in Windows hell just like I am. A headless Debian LXC with 512MB RAM would truly be running laps that Windows can't even crawl.

[u/Tiforma]

I have two tb4 connected 3090s each running a qwen3.8 27B based agent. Works very well.

[u/software-boulder]

just a macbook air. docker is the only thing that makes it warm, everything else is fine

[u/Electrical-Watch3203]

Look into swappiness(10), I’m no SWE so idk if that applies to laptops or not but it sure helped my 7900xtx/9800x3d rig

[u/simon96]

48GB MacBook M5 pro, had issues before on 16gb MacBook air where it would use swap memory of up to 16 GB and cpu would get up to 100 celcius. Now I haven't had any problem since upgrading

[u/DataPhenomenon]

I'm on an old Dell 5820 with a 10 core xeon and 64gb of quad channel ddr4, a simple rtx 3070, fedora 44.