Q: What are the minimum system requirements for xcode

wow, I was planning on getting a Mac Mini to do some Xamarin development (long time C# / WPF developer), it requires Xamarin Studio and XCode running. Are you saying this might be an issue on a 8Gb system ?

My guess would be that 8GB should works fine (16GB may be a better long term choice as many modern macs come with soldered RAM i.e. non-upgradeable RAM).

Xcode uses about 2GB of RAM for a medium size project (~40,000 lines of code and comments), with 15-20 open editor tabs and 10-15 related open .h files. I typically also run Firefox (using 2-4GB) and a few other somewhat memory hungry apps (Thunderbird, iTunes, ...) on a mac with 10GB of RAM.

Note that El Capitan (OSX 10.11) seems somewhat more RAM hungry[1] than OSX 10.10. I've started to see some occasional beachballing when running Firefox at 4GB (100-150 open and loaded tabs).

1. I'm not quite sure what is using more RAM but I noticed a increase in Swap Used and the amount of Compressed memory after switching from Xcode 6.4 -> 7.2 and OSX 10.10.5 -> 10.11.2 at about the same time a few weeks back.

Sounds good. I will get the 8Gb version and cross my fingers.

Thank you for your help

Just to add to the general chorus:

I'm pretty broke so I was forced to buy a 2010 Macbook Pro to run the current version of Xcode (I was using a 2007 Macbook that was stuck on Xcode 4.6), which came with 4 GB of RAM.

With Xcode 7.1.1 I spend a huge amount of time staring at the spinning beach ball or simply waiting for auto-completion to actually do something. If I've added a new public property or variable it can be 5 minutes before client classes can see it. Launching the Simulator is a 5 - 10 minute long process, as is resetting its contents and settings or switching to a different device. Creating a new file can take 1 - 2 minutes easy. Storyboard and XIBs frequently hang for a minute or more. You get the idea.

I just switched over to mostly working in Swift, and everything seems to have become a little worse.

I've got a 8 GB RAM kit on the way as I write this, so hopefully that will make a difference.

So with all that said, as previously mentioned, get the newest, fastest system you can afford with the most RAM. Xcode is way more processor intensive and RAM hungry than any other IDE I've used.

It's been a few days since I've upgraded to 8 GB of RAM on my mid-2010 Macbook Pro, and for those who might be reading this thread and wondering whether such a system can run Xcode, the upgrade has definitely made a huge difference.

While the Simulator still takes a few minutes to launch or switch devices, and I still get some hangs when switching to the Storyboard, when I'm actually writing code I no longer get constant, 10 - 30 second periods of spinning beach ball, or having all the text turn one color; I can pretty much just write code as fast as my fingers and brain can go. Running on the Simulator is also quite a bit faster, and I have yet to have a build fail to attach (a pretty regular occurrence before).

Note that this is with the usual suite of other applications open: Chrome (20 - 40 tabs), iTunes, Open Office, Preview, Mail, etc... Activity Monitor says I'm using around 6.5 GB of RAM, so it's no wonder it was hurting before.

So definitely still get a newer system if you can afford it, but if a mid-2010 Macbook Pro is the best you can afford, or what you happen to have, as long as you have at least 8 GB of RAM (OWC and others sell 16 GB kits that aren't officially supported by Apple but are largely reported to work), Xcode should work fine.

Bringing back this dead thread sorry. I have a 2009 MacBook Core 2 duo 4gb of ram, and it runs xcode pretty well since I put in a SSD. The hard drive was the bottleneck in the applications I was writing. I am posting this incase someone else stumbles upon this in the same situation as myself.