Decreasing RAM use of default environment?

[cboettig]

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I've really been enjoying teaching with GitHub Codespaces -- being able to configure my student's template repos with a .devcontainer that ensures they can drop in a VM at the click of a button that already has precisely the software we need for that specific project already installed is phenomenal. We cut past hours of arbitrary installation debugging and get right to the good stuff.

However, we're really struggling against the OOM killer in the 2-core VMs for educational purposes -- even with relatively elementary code examples. Doing a bit of monitoring on the resource stats, it seems the majority of the RAM is already allocated to core processes for the VM environment (node tasks mostly), not the code the students are running.

Is there a way to make the vscode environment use a smaller memory footprint, so we might have just a little free RAM left over for our actual coding? We have already cut out some of the nice extensions, which makes me sad since they really do improve user experience.

Alternatively, if the default educational instances could have even an extra gig or two of RAM, it would constitute a very large improvement in the student user experience. I'd love to introduce more people to the magic here with the launch of a free quota tier for everyone, but the overall quality of the experience on the free tier would be so much better with just a tad bit more working memory.

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