I'm not familiar with the MacBook Air but until recently I was developing on a MacBook Pro 2011. The main issue was memory. It was upgraded from 4 GB to the maximum 8 GB, which helped a lot but I still had to be careful.
I always had the Activity Monitor running to check on memory-greedy processes. And I was always reluctant to upgrade the OS in case it impacted the memory use. Right now it's on High Sierra.
I didn't use VS Code much. Too slow to start up and taking too much memory for my liking. I used Sublime Text instead and the command line. That worked fine with my use of Node and React.
My advice:
if not already done and possible (check the specs), upgrade the RAM
use a light-weight editor and use the command line
monitor memory use
close any app with a big footprint that you don't need for developing (I gave up on iTunes; I use Evernote as my second brain but it tries to keep everything in memory and once in a while I need to close it and start afresh)
close any browser tabs that eat a lot of memory (some pages run in the gigabytes)
I'd say keep an eye on the CPU as well but in my case it was never an issue.
I see that even older MacBooks Pro work much better than Airs. I cannot upgrade the memory (it's not possible for Air, only for Pro). CPU is not a problem too, only memory, as I noticed observing the Activity Monitor. I'm very modest in using the resources, but when I need to run a couple of npm processes simultaneously or build native mobile apps with Android Studio and XCode, I get close to psychological breakdown.
What is your experience in similar situations? Do Pro and 8 Gb work well for you in such cases?
Sorry I can't be much help. I tend to run npm processes sequentially and it's been years since I last used XCode. As far as I can tell XCode is a lot worse than VSCode in terms of RAM requirements.
Concerning multiple npm processes, after a good night's sleep I remembered that I used to run a (small) MongoDB database, an Express server and a React client concurrently without problems.
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I'm not familiar with the MacBook Air but until recently I was developing on a MacBook Pro 2011. The main issue was memory. It was upgraded from 4 GB to the maximum 8 GB, which helped a lot but I still had to be careful.
I always had the Activity Monitor running to check on memory-greedy processes. And I was always reluctant to upgrade the OS in case it impacted the memory use. Right now it's on High Sierra.
I didn't use VS Code much. Too slow to start up and taking too much memory for my liking. I used Sublime Text instead and the command line. That worked fine with my use of Node and React.
My advice:
Thanks for your detailed reply, Sylvie!
I see that even older MacBooks Pro work much better than Airs. I cannot upgrade the memory (it's not possible for Air, only for Pro). CPU is not a problem too, only memory, as I noticed observing the Activity Monitor. I'm very modest in using the resources, but when I need to run a couple of npm processes simultaneously or build native mobile apps with Android Studio and XCode, I get close to psychological breakdown.
What is your experience in similar situations? Do Pro and 8 Gb work well for you in such cases?
Sorry I can't be much help. I tend to run npm processes sequentially and it's been years since I last used XCode. As far as I can tell XCode is a lot worse than VSCode in terms of RAM requirements.
Exactly. Thinking about delegating all the Xcode stuff to iMac
It would probably make your life easier.
Concerning multiple npm processes, after a good night's sleep I remembered that I used to run a (small) MongoDB database, an Express server and a React client concurrently without problems.