Revisiting How Much RAM Is Enough Today For Desktop Computing

jjslash writes: An article at TechSpot tests how much RAM you need for regular desktop computing and how it affects performance in apps and games. As it turns out, there's not much benefit going beyond 8 GB for regular programs, and surprisingly, 4GB still seems to be enough for gaming in most cases. Although RAM is cheap these days, and they had to go to absurdly unrealistic settings to simulate high demand for memory outside of virtualization, it's a good read to confirm our judgment calls on what is enough for most in 2015.

Comments

As much as possible

[TechyImmigrant]

The more RAM I have, the better.

Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.

Re:As much as possible

[cayenne8]

I don't know much about games...but on my late 2011 MBP with 16GB ram, core i7 CPU...I can quickly drag it into the mud and bog it down 100% with some renders with After Effects CS6, or even FCPX with many laters, or PS CS6 if I have more than a couple layers with smart objects.

I really wish I had about 64GB ram or more...am planning on going for a desktop this next time around of some type so that I can load it up more.

Re: As much as possible

[the_humeister]

Ditto some of my Blender scenes, which can use up 20+GB of RAM, which pretty much rules out GPU rendering for me.

Re: As much as possible

[suutar]

Agreed with both you and GP, but I think this indicates a shift in what's considered "desktop computing". Not that long ago this would have been server work for anyone who had enough systems to distinguish between servers and desktops.

Re:As much as possible

[Tablizer]

The more RAM I have, the better.

So you can have lots and lots of active viruses.

Re: As much as possible

[Dr. Eggman]

Same here with Maya. I've even thought about bumping it up to 64 GB from its current 32.

Really, anytime I see these kinds of articles pop up, I just substitute its title with "How much X is enough for our product's target market" anymore. They're really not useful as a general analysis, the desktop market is just to broad.

Re:As much as possible

[TechyImmigrant]

The more RAM I have, the better.

Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.

Too much RAM is dangerous because without ECC the risk of corruption becomes very high.

For some stuff I do checksums on the bulk data to capture bit errors. It's not worth correcting for. Just re-run. It happens maybe a couple of times a year but my sample space on my current biggest machine is only 2 years. If it happened more often, ECC RAM would be more optimal. If I had the option for desktop computers I would be buying ECC ram.

When I abuse the company server farms, they do have ECC, but I'm running on desktops because people don't like it when I run my jobs on shared machines. 1 4 core, 8 thread i7 PC with 64Gig of ram runnning 24/7 can keep on going on, whereas shared servers in a rack somewhere have variable load and you have to nanny it.

I played with EC2, but it's expensive if your compute load is unbounded.

Re: As much as possible

[Sowelu]

Render farms for 3d stuff. Previously, rendering something on your desktop that looked remotely like the finished product was almost laughable.

Re: As much as possible

[Shinobi]

Bullshit... Video rendering and 3D creation and rendering was desktop work already back in the 90's for hobbyists and small studios, and remains so to this day.

That's what pissed me off the most with the article, the video test was limited to encoding, not actually editing clips, working with layering, effects etc. Likewise, the Blender test is very limited in how many textures and complex multi-layer shaders are involved, it stresses geometry and rendering to a greater degree.

Not to mention that when you sit and actively work with a scene, you often have photoshop, gimp or some other program open too, as part of your workflow, creating textures, UV-maps, light maps, shadow maps, mattes&masks, height maps and normal maps etc etc...

Re:As much as possible

[Austerity Empowers]

The difference is on your MBP you probably never close an app unless it's a one-off that you don't use frequently. I know I have several dozen open apps right now across 15 virtual screens and servo between them over an 8 hour day as I become blocked on one task and switch to another. Why shut them down only to spend 10 minutes relaunching? On linux or OS X, with unlimited desktops, why bother?

However on my Windows machine I tend to use just 2-3 apps at a time, and shut down before starting a new effort. This is pre-Windows 10 behavior, for the record. In windows multiple desktops was always a nuisance, so its best to close things down so your alt-tab or taskbar didn't end up unusable. I wonder if post-Win10, we don't see people using a lot more RAM.

Re: As much as possible

[Shinobi]

That's only if you think in terms of top-end movies etc. However, there's plenty of bread and butter work being done where the final rendering is done on the desktops of the artists at small studios etc, such as advertisement spots or stills, product design, architectural visualization etc etc, and that's just on the professional side. You also have to factor in the hobbyist side.

Re:As much as possible

[Lumpy]

Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.

Re: As much as possible

[jedidiah]

Any computing task will eventually complete eventually. That doesn't mean that any one wants to put up with waiting for long compute jobs if they can avoid it.

Anyone that's left the garage probably wants a render farm (and has one).

Even some people that are still just working with a single rack in their bedroom probably prefer a cluster.

Re:As much as possible

[jedidiah]

You are trying to sell a distinction that never really existed. There have always been more powerful and more expensive PCs. Always.

"workstations" were originally desktop variants from commercial Unix vendors.

Re:As much as possible

[UnknownSoldier]

Another game dev here. Running with 32GB and Window's retarded Virtual Memory turned off. You'll love the upgrade!

One note: If you are on Windows 7 you will need Windows 7 Professional (or higher), because Win 7 Starter / Home / Premium versions are crippled to only supporting 16 GB. Microsoft "fixed" this in Windows 8.1+

* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...

Having 32GB allows you to spin up a few VMs each with 4GB if needed, and still have plenty of available RAM to keep 30+ tabs of Chrome/Firefox open, MSVC, Gimp/Photoshop, VM's all open all the time.

Re: As much as possible

[Shinobi]

Actually, most hobby users go for multi-GPU setups instead, and render on GPU+CPU. More cost and space efficient than the nerds with their racks at home.

Re:As much as possible

[Carewolf]

Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.

Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.

Re:As much as possible

[Z00L00K]

It all depends on what you do. For me 16GB seems to be OK with Windows 7, at work my computer was essentially bricked with 4GB and with 8GB it's bearable.

The worst problem is actually programs that don't manage memory usage well.

Re:As much as possible

[LWATCDR]

32 is enough for me but I run VMs.

Re:As much as possible

[Drethon]

Just between firefox and a couple of visual studio instances I've fried off a couple gigs of memory. Supporting programs use up a couple more plus a touch extra overhead. So I'm over 4.5G just in my most basic development environment. At home I prefer a minimum of 16G but work doesn't want to go over 8 it seems (and I've used 8 up a couple times).

Re: As much as possible

[amiga3D]

I agree. I bumped my Mac Mini to 16GB of RAM and suddenly editing video became super fast. It was amazing the improvement it made. That's with simple home movies from my consumer grade HD video camera. I can imagine the difference it would make with commercial grade stuff. Honestly though I have to say nothing else uses more than 8GB of RAM, but still it's worth the money for the extra 8GB when I'm editing. It's so much quicker and smoother now.

Re:As much as possible

[sudon't]

Right. As TFA says, RAM is cheap, so why not max out your slots? Zero pageouts is a good thing. As it happens, I have 16 GB. While it never fills up, (that I've seen), it does regularly use more than 8 GB. There's no reason not to have that extra chip.

Re: As much as possible

[maestroX]

that's correct, but nowadays every tab needs its own bootstrap GUI and cookie tracking collection. not even counting the sliders

Re:As much as possible

[tommeke100]

Professionally (Software Developer) on a Windows 7 with 16G of ram (3 yr old top end Intel processor 8-core, I'm guessing i7 but not sure), 2 video cards with 3 monitors. I have Eclipse open with about 100 Maven Java projects open (don't ask). SQLDeveloper with some open connections to databases. Cygwin. Firefox with 8 tabs (gmail, subversion, jira, jenkins, intranet, slashdot, ...), a Cassandra database (for debugging and testing purposes, not under heavy load), some legacy Java services running with GUIs etc... It all works fine, no issues here.

Re:As much as possible

[Zak3056]

Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.

Throw 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD into one of the new Dells, and I think you might find they outperform your MBP...

Re:As much as possible

[WheezyJoe]

Slap in a 1tb SSD and it really makes a difference I run 2 VM's daily on 16gb on a late 2011 MBP and the SSD make it faster than any brand new dell I have seen come in the office.

Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.

Hmm. 1tb SSD going on newegg today for $477. Quarter of that is ~$120. What would $120 buy to dramatically speed up an office-grade dell?

I think the point is swapping out a spinning hard drive with an SSD is the single best way to show dramatic improvement to your rig, and SSD's are cheaper and more reliable than ever (plus, that whole TRIM thing with macs is now solved). OTOH, spinning drives and 4GB RAM are still the standard on all the cheap new dells for sale out there. Once you deck out a dell with similar features to a mac, the prices become pretty comparable (e.g., Dell XPS 13 with 256 GB SSD and 8GB RAM and Windows Home is $1599, whereas a 13-inch Macbook Pro with similar specs comes in at $1499). The rule applies: fast, reliable, cheap (choose two).

Re:As much as possible

[thedonger]

For comparison, I am a software developer on Core i7 Win 7 64 bit on a 3-year old Lenovo T520. I regularly use 6.5 GB or more of 8 GB of RAM with one instance of SSMS and three or 4 instances of VS2013 (plus Chrome, IE, Outlook, and often some Office programs). There must be a lot of system shit sucking RAM, too, because I have never counted more than 5 GB of my own programs. But still, I'd at least feel way better with 16 GB. (Also, the company bought laptops with 160 GB hard drives, so I regularly have to fight for every GBs (and even MBs) of space so I can compile projects.)

Re:As much as possible

[tommeke100]

Obviously I forgot Outlook :) And some background noise IT puts on every box (AV and some remote managing take-over stuff)

Re:As much as possible

[Anonymous Coward]

But by adding more RAM, you're creating more heat, which means more entropy, which means you have more to analyze, so you need more RAM...

Re: As much as possible

[suutar]

Certainly, interactive stuff will be on the desktop. My comment was meant to address the grunt work of rendering a bunch of high res frames after the designer has set up the backgrounds and motion; a studio with enough systems is likely to put that grunt work on a server system to keep the desktop box usable for design if they can (and when they need to; after hours, any cpu in a renderstorm :)

Re:As much as possible

[Penguinisto]

Try spending a quarter as much on the dell next time you compare.

I love this argument... but you forget, spending $500 on a dell laptop means you'll still fall short on specs. Like-for-like, a comparable Dell comes in at around 60-80% of a new MBP, depending on how close you want to match the specs (and where in Apple's roadmap/cycle you buy the Dell). So at the charitable 60%, you're still spending $1200 to match a brand new $2k MBP. But wait - your Dell will last maybe 3 years maximum, unless you're really careful. That MBP he mentioned has lasted 4 years and counting... most folks I know of with an MBP usually keep them for 6-8 years or so (my own is 2 years old and counting; I just barely chucked in a second HDD for mass storage, and ripped out my optical drive to make room for it since I never use the thing.)

Re: As much as possible

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

Any computing task will eventually complete eventually.

Are you sure about that? Church and Turing weren't.

Re:As much as possible

[Penguinisto]

Throw 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD into one of the new Dells, and I think you might find they outperform your MBP...

Depends on usage; a CG render engine eats CPU, which no amount of RAM or I/O speed will affect.

By the way, trying to match a new Dell what my 2012-model MBP has winds up costing a mint...)

Re: As much as possible

[jawtheshark]

Have you looked recently? My Dell XPS 15 L502x, that I bought a few years ago on sale for 525â can take 16GB. We bought three of these and we all upgraded from the stock 4GB to 16GB because RAM prices were at an all time low. I can't believe modern laptops take less....

Re:As much as possible

[Just Some Guy]

Too much RAM is dangerous because without ECC the risk of corruption becomes very high.

That's unlikely to be true. You'll increase the chance of getting an unstable but, but decrease the chance of that bit affecting any given piece of information you care about.

Re:As much as possible

[Mike610544]

Music production is another case where no amount of memory is ever enough. Playing back a lot of sampled virtual instruments eats RAM like crazy.

I put 32GB in my current machine and still hit that limit frequently.

Re: As much as possible

[Malc]

Yup I have a MBP at home from Feb 2008. The biggest problem with it is the lack of memory (max spec'ed is 4GB, you can get it to work with 6GB but I normally have 8-9 and allocated and I'm fed up with the speed.). My work MBP's have had 16GB for years and I frequently have more than 20GB allocated - it's hard to imagine a new MBP lasting so long. I can't help feeling that there's a pretty bad memory leak in OS X considering I've observed multiple machines low on memory with no apps running once I get to about a month after the last reboot.

Re: As much as possible

[sconeu]

[shakes fist]

Curse you Hotawa Hawk-eye! I was going to say that, but you beat me to it!!!

Re:As much as possible

[Khyber]

"Why shut them down only to spend 10 minutes relaunching?"

If shit takes 10 minutes to relaunch you're doing something horribly wrong.

Re:As much as possible

[Khyber]

"Music production is another case where no amount of memory is ever enough. Playing back a lot of sampled virtual instruments eats RAM like crazy."

No, that's the shit software you're using.

Old Fruity Loops 3 on a Celeron 400MHz with 384MB PC-133 SDRAM with about 128 sampled virtual instruments as solid patches, tons of fx, and not one issue.

Still running to this day just for that.

Re:As much as possible

[Khyber]

Chrome has its own Flash version built-in.

Re:As much as possible

[larryjoe]

The raw error rate for DRAM tends to correlate with DRAM chips. Raw, non-ECC soft error rates are in the neighborhood of 10 FIT/chip or say 160 FIT/DIMM for a DIMM with 16 chips. Let's consider a system with 4 DIMMs, which has 640 FIT. That's equivalent to a soft error every 178 years. Hard errors are additional, but for the typical amounts of DRAM in a PC, soft errors (and usually also hard errors) are inconsequential.

Also, field studies (see Sridharan, SC12) show that around half of all soft errors are not correctable with SECDED ECC.

Re:As much as possible

[Desiree Hindenburg]

> Replace these with just one straight "var" variable and let the runtime increase the size of the variable if the number would overflow.

This would break so much stuff:

  * Various bit masks, like IP address subnet mask;
  * All the code that shifts bits to the left, and just assumes that the ones that overflow simply disappear;
  * Various “-1” hacks;
  * Systems that encode negative numbers by setting the most significant bit to one;
  * If you try to invert all the bits in a number, you get what, infinity?
  * I think you get the idea...

Not necessarily a bad suggestion, but it would create an entirely different system of computing.

Re:As much as possible

[thegarbz]

But wait - your Dell will last maybe 3 years maximum

You were fine until you introduced unbiased conjecture into your argument. Tell me can you still get batteries for your 7 year old MBP? I did for my 100% fully working and not well looked after (cracked case in several places, missing 2 keys and a volume button) Dell only 2 months ago.

Re:As much as possible

[thegarbz]

Hahahah "unbiased" man I need a coffee.

Re:As much as possible

[Penguinisto]

Tell me can you still get batteries for your 7 year old MBP?

That *was* a good question, but for giggles, I did a quickie search for a battery that fits a 2007 MBP on Amazon, and no problem - this is one of 211 results. It popped up almost instantly. It was one of like 98 results.

But let's really have fun here and pull one up for a Powerbook G4 - they stopped making those 10 years ago...

Re:As much as possible

[Penguinisto]

grr - the 98 results was for the old Powerbook :)

Re:As much as possible

[runningduck]

No no no! You should never size a system based on likely real world scenarios over the lifetime of the system. You should always size a system based on single tasked benchmarks!

Re: As much as possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about rendering on the desktop? People still use render farms for final production, but the *work* is done on the desktops.

Re: As much as possible

[hackwrench]

Oh, but they failed to account for the fact that when you shut the computer off, that computing task has completed.

Re:As much as possible

[arglebargle_xiv]

Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.

... which is obviously completely representative of the workload that Joe Sixpack is running on his home PC.

(I'm running genetic algorithms that require 16-20TB of VM, but I don't make any decisions based on that because it's not like any workload that J.Random public would be running. From doing the usual helping out with family and neighbours PCs, most of them would get by fine with 2GB, and maybe an 800MHz CPU if you have hibernate enabled so the boot time isn't so long).

Re:As much as possible

[TechyImmigrant]

Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.

... which is obviously completely representative of the workload that Joe Sixpack is running on his home PC.

(I'm running genetic algorithms that require 16-20TB of VM, but I don't make any decisions based on that because it's not like any workload that J.Random public would be running. From doing the usual helping out with family and neighbours PCs, most of them would get by fine with 2GB, and maybe an 800MHz CPU if you have hibernate enabled so the boot time isn't so long).

I've yet to find what J.Random public is. People's workloads seem diverse in quantity and type. My basic unit of data is 1TB, mostly because that's what people can deliver to me on a reasonably priced disk.

I anticipate that what was a pain 5 years ago and is a day's compute load today will be nothing in terms of network bandwidth, storage an compute a few years from now. My jobs won't get bigger. There will just be the capability to do more of them per unit time. The real work comes when the data isn't right and I have to engage the brain to diagnose the defect in algorithm, architecture or circuit. I don't get any faster with time.

Re:As much as possible

[bingoUV]

Like-for-like, a comparable Dell comes in at around 60-80% of a new MBP

That is if you start with an MBP. If you start with Dell - cheapest 16 GB business Dell Laptop (i5558-8574SLV) sells for $859 on Newegg. NOW try to get MBP that matches it - cheapest MBP with 16 GB RAM is $1799 on Apple's website ($1889 on Newegg so ignoring that).

Dell ends up costing 47% of MBP, in other words, less than half.

Chose memory for two reasons -
1. /. story is about memory.
2. Increasing tendency of Apple to solder memory.

Re: As much as possible

[bluegutang]

Any computing task will eventually complete eventually.

Are you sure about that? Church and Turing weren't.

Any *true* computer task will complete eventually.

Re:As much as possible

[Ryan McLaughlin]

Apple usually drops support for hardware after a few years (currently 6 years). If you look at the current OSX system requirements it says it only supports 2009 macs and above https://support.apple.com/en-u...

On the flip side Windows 10 will install on much older machines, and in some cases will run faster on a Mac then OSX http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...

Re: As much as possible

[thedonger]

Go buy your own HDD (or SSD). Who cares how cheap your company is? They are all cheap, but the good devs spend their own money on tools / upgrades / etc.

Encrypted SSD drive. Public company dealing with PHI. I take care of having my favorite peripherals, but I don't mess with the computer hardware.

Re:As much as possible

[Shirley Marquez]

It's also the fact that the sample sets keep getting bigger, which gets you modest but real gains in quality. Some virtual instruments are now using multi-samples - sample sets where the instrument is recorded at different volumes/intensities - to get a more accurate model. There are now grand piano sample sets that are over a gigabyte - and that's just ONE instrument.

Re:As much as possible

[cayenne8]

The difference is on your MBP you probably never close an app unless it's a one-off that you don't use frequently. I know I have several dozen open apps right now across 15 virtual screens and servo between them over an 8 hour day as I become blocked on one task and switch to another. Why shut them down only to spend 10 minutes relaunching? On linux or OS X, with unlimited desktops, why bother?

Actually...no.

I find when I'm doing render jobs or even working in AE, to get performance I often have to shut everything else down...even stopping email and my browser..those seem to suck up a lot of resources.

No, even with what I have...on anything moderately stressful in video or photoshop, I have to pretty much ONLY have that one app running to get any use out of it at all.

Re:As much as possible

[Khyber]

I've got a few 64MB sample sets from a decade ago that are pretty much indistinguishable from real instruments (excepting guitar, which is nigh-impossible to get right with all the various methods of playing.)

The smart folks use waveform generators for wavetable synthesis, instead of multi-recorded stuff. Even my Alesis drumkit uses waveform generated samples instead of recorded and engineered/layered samples.

Re:As much as possible

[goose-incarnated]

> Replace these with just one straight "var" variable and let the runtime increase the size of the variable if the number would overflow.

This would break so much stuff:

* Various bit masks, like IP address subnet mask; * All the code that shifts bits to the left, and just assumes that the ones that overflow simply disappear; * Various “-1” hacks;

I'm with you on the rest, but -1 (int8_t) can be equality compared to -1 (int64_t) with no problems.

[snipped] * If you try to invert all the bits in a number, you get what, infinity?

Currently you get -1 no matter the bit width of the integer.

Re:As much as possible

[Agripa]

If I had the option for desktop computers I would be buying ECC ram.

If you build your own, then ECC support is not difficult to come by although it is much easier and less expensive with AMD than with Intel who uses it as a market segmentation feature. Every one of my desktops going back 10+ years has had ECC RAM and the last three going back to the Celeron 300A still run.

Re:As much as possible

[chrysrobyn]

In windows multiple desktops was always a nuisance

If you're referring to what I think you are, have you checked out VirtuaWin? It's not perfect (specifically with PowerPoint -- don't leave it open in one desktop and open an existing document in another -- all other apps I've used have worked well), but it's a fine product with excellent utility.

so...

[buddyglass]

I have a MacBook Air w/ 8GB. I can run a browser with ~8 tabs, Eclipse, Postgres, Rails, and Mail, and not have it really feel sluggish.

Re:so...

[FranTaylor]

What if you try a more normal load? What if you opened a project in Eclipse or tried to do a build?

normal people open projects in eclipse and run builds?

Re:so...

[CauseBy]

Yeah my company just replaced my 8GB MacBook Pro with a 16GM version. I do Java dev work and the 8GB limit was okay for writing code and building, but when running tests (actually running the actual software, plus all the test framework and whatnot) I'd started getting out-of-memory exceptions.

And my home desktop machine I just upped to the max of 16GB, too. That's plenty because it's Ubuntu, but I still had second thoughts about my selection of a motherboard that supports a max of 16GB RAM. Next time I'll go WAY higher.

Running a single game?

[Nutria]

Who the hell voted *that* the be-all and end-all measure of need in desktop RAM???

Re:Running a single game?

[TWX]

Someone operating in a little bubble.

I've got a Windows VM for the corporate stuff that I have to do that has 2GB allocated to it. The box that the VM used to be on has 8GB, which is more than enough for the purposes it's used for. I've got other boxes that are basically just dummy console aggregators that have 2GB and could probably get away with more like 128MB given the lack of GUI.

Re:Running a single game?

[Dr_Barnowl]

2GB is quite tight for a Windows VM now ; I've recently upgraded my physical RAM to 16GB and my Windows VM to 4GB and it performs noticeably better.

All it does is run Office and a few other corporate apps.

Re:Running a single game?

[Carewolf]

Anything more intensive than gaming would no longer be in the sphere of simple desktop computing and move into the workstation space.

Yes, it would. Games are usually 32bit, desktop applications are not. Games need to run on old or crappy consoles with little memory or CPU, desktop applications do not.

Re:Running a single game?

[Ravaldy]

Agreed for most users. 4GB is the minimum I spec for VMs and I usually make 8GB the minimum for workstations.

2GB is fine for a barebone OS with a light custom app but I would never advise anybody to go that route unless H/W limitations were present. I've seen this occur often with computers included with industrial manufacturing equipment.

Re:Running a single game?

[mlts]

I used to find that XP + a Web browser would fit comfortably in 512 MB of RAM on a VM. However, since XP is no longer supported, 2 GB is what is decent for running a sandboxed web browser [1] in Windows 7 without having it start thrashing.

Some applications (accounting software) I like keeping in their own VM, so 4 gigs is useful as well.

For any office suite, 4GB, hands down. 2GB just doesn't cut it.

As for the base machine, if one does basic virtualization as a way to separate tasks (browse the web in one VM, etc.), I would say that 16GB is a must, preferably 32 because the RAM that isn't used can be used as a read cache. Also, since one is dealing with multiple operating systems all vying for control of the read-write head, a SSD will make a lot of difference as well just because of all the random I/O requests (the I/O blender effect is what the trade rags call it.)

[1]: SandboxIE. Nothing is 100% secure, but it doesn't add that much more work, and adds a definite layer of security.

Re:Running a single game?

[suutar]

someone probably figured it was the most common high-demand use case. A MMORPG probably uses more ram than most other single apps for most people (web browsers with lots of tabs may be an exception). The average slashdot reader is not the average computer user (more's the pity :)

Re:Running a single game?

[Blaskowicz]

And VM can use any made up amount of RAM, so nudge it a little. For instance give it 2432MB, why?, because I made that up.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM beyond 8G, if not used for programs will be used to cache disk and any time you can cache disk you win.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you assuming we are all using Windows? If Windows is too stupid to make full use of available memory, that's too bad for Windows users.

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

Maybe someday there will be a non-Unix OS that isn't shit, but I am not holding my breath.

Of course. VMS. It's been proven definitively.

Re:Bullshit

[CauseBy]

Awesome and hilarious. I've never even seen a VMS system.

Re:Bullshit

[Shinobi]

"Maybe someday there will be a non-Unix OS that isn't shit, but I am not holding my breath."

Personally, I'm waiting for another non-Apple UNIX that actually makes heavy interactive graphics work as smooth for the user as it is on Windows. Linux and FreeBSD both feel clunky and choppy, no matter what scheduler settings I use, or how I config X etc. IRIX was the last one I used that actually felt decent for interactive use, but they also went with the approach Windows used, and Apple later chose for OSX, with a tight graphics stack integration, from kernel up to desktop.

Re:Bullshit

[phantomfive]

VMS fans really liked the system, and felt downgraded when they had to switch to Unix. The creator of VMS certainly hated Unix. Eventually he went on to design Windows NT, and you can see his influence there.

Re:Bullshit

[WheezyJoe]

Young spoiled whipper-snappers, with your free Unix clones on cheap x86!
Get off my lawn!
Where's my VT-220? My VAX needs oiling!

Re:Bullshit

[Christian Smith]

Why are you assuming we are all using Windows? If Windows is too stupid to make full use of available memory, that's too bad for Windows users.

I'm with Windows on this one. You don't want to much outstanding dirty data in RAM, as you lose it on an unexpected power loss.

Disk write speeds are not that critical unless you're doing synchronous output anyway (think database transaction commit) or swapping to disk when under memory pressure, but in the latter case you're clearly using all the RAM already anyway.

Re:Bullshit

[dwywit]

Maybe someday there will be a non-Unix OS that isn't shit, but I am not holding my breath.

Well then, perhaps you need to get out more, and don't limit yourself to Unix or Windows.

disk cache

[Lead Butthead]

with prevalence of SSD, disk cache is just adding latency to your I/O.

Re:disk cache

[amorsen]

This is far from true. Even in the case of PCIe SSD (still a rarity), RAM is an order of magnitude faster, and much more for truly random access.

Re:disk cache

[TeknoHog]

with prevalence of SSD, disk cache is

even more important to minimize the number of writes.

Re:disk cache

[xenotransplant]

Especially considering the speeds you can squish out of modern ram these days.

Re:disk cache

[Blaskowicz]

And you need PCIe with NVMe not PCIe with AHCI to bring the latency down some more.

Re:For anyone?

[linear a]

Nobody will ever need more than 640 GB of memory. - William Gates

We need to keep demand up

[fustakrakich]

Otherwise prices will collapse, and they'll have to burn down another factory to avoid saturating the market even worse!

Besides, more RAM means I can run a bigger Beowulf cluster of virtual machines...

Virtualization requires memory

[ErichTheRed]

I routinely have scenarios where I have to take entire environments "on the road" with me. Either the access to "The Cloud" isn't available at a reasonable rate, or I have to simulate something in an environment where I control all the variables, like WAN speeds and such. The single best way to make VMWare run better on desktop hardware is to feed it more memory. The less it needs to swap out to hard drives, the more responsive it is.

With the advent of cheap SSDs and multicore, multithread CPUs, the "responsiveness" factor requires less memory than it did for normal workloads. I put that in quotes, because responsiveness is a very fuzzy quantity, pretty much defined as "does the user notice how slow it is?"

Re:Virtualization requires memory

[mlts]

There are always scenarios that one doesn't realize, but come in handy. For example, having a PFSense appliance in front of a Windows VM to ensure that nothing leaks in case the VPN tunnel to work gets dropped. VMWare Workstation does do a number of tricks to help maximize use of RAM, but in any case, there is no substitute for it, even if it just there being used for caching. VMWare Fusion is even more RAM hungry, so having 16 or more GB of RAM available (plus a SSD if possible) doesn't hurt and can save headaches, especially when travelling.

Of course, it would be nice if VMWare made an ESXi variant that allowed VMs to use the local keyboard and monitor, with any 3D acceleration from the video card available. That would be nice for being able to run a game, but keep Windows firmly away from the hardware, and ESXi does a great job at dealing with RAM overcommits, so if one adds more SSD, paging isn't too bad.

Re:Virtualization requires memory

[Blaskowicz]

ESXi and Xen do that, you need a IOMMU (Vt-d) and a compatible chipset, BIOS/EFI and graphics card. Every hardware has the IOMMU now but Intel disables it at random (but increasingly leaves it enabled) and nvidia does disable compatibility for market segmenting too. Then the whole mess has to be supported enough to work together.
It's still a niche thing but you can possibly get that crap running.

Re:Virtualization requires memory

[Desiree Hindenburg]

So, how would that physically work: you need two graphics controllers, one to see the Hypervisor interface, and the second one for the PCI pass-through to guests; and then a switch for to flip between the two adapters?
Or do you run the Hypervisor headless, and control it from another device via network, or COM port?
Or do you mean just the GPU compute part is passed through to the guests, with no way for them to use GPU for rendering?

Re:Virtualization requires memory

[Blaskowicz]

1) and 2) yes, 3) not.
You do get the real GPU, which does display at full 3D acceleration and low latency.
It might be possible to get the IGP or second graphics card (with or without passthrough) to display the hypervisor or another OS (say linux) in which case you need 2nd display, or KVM switch or a monitor with two inputs.
Serial console would be nice, else ssh. Worst case only the Windows desktop can display, but from there you could ssh or VNC etc. into a linux VM, and if you reboot the Windows VM for applying updates the linux one(s) stay online.
You can pass through a USB controller or SATA controller etc. One mild thing some people do is to install such hypervisor setting but only for headless linux / BSD VMs : a SATA/SAS controller card is passed to a NAS VM (say FreeBSD with ZFS) which gets to see it as real hardware. VGA pass through is harder because the VGA BIOS is something a bit special, and so it might fail.

Minimum hardware is Xeon on X58 chipset, or AMD CPU on 970, 990FX etc. (or some prior) motherboard ; AMD since has IOMMU even on lowest end hardware. But to know if it works you're left googling for reports of people getting it to run.

VM's

[emho24]

"how much RAM you need for regular desktop computing"

The word "regular" is probably the key. I have 32 gig of ram in my home machine because I like to spin up multiple VM's and leave them running. Windows will happily gobble up 2 gig of your ram, and if it's 32bit windows you really only have 3.5 gig to access. So that leaves your typical user with ~1.5 gig of ram for programs. Probably fine for "regular" computing but woefully inadequate for any serious use of a pc.

Re:VM's

[jeffmflanagan]

Those of us who use VMs have different needs than the typical user. I have 16 GB of RAM, so I can run 3 virtual PCs at reasonable speed to test networked applications, but I'd only put 8GB in a PC that isn't used for VMs. This would still be a PC for serious use, just not for virtual machines.

Re:VM's

[Jerry Atrick]

I have 32Gb because Visual C++ on an 8 core CPU is currently gobbling 24Gb and 99% CPU to compile my project. The remaining 8Gb is caching the source or it would be much slower. Because of that caching adding an SSD made no detectable difference!

The data build just barely runs 6 parallel processes in 32Gb. Just. And still takes 4-5 hours.

For normal tasks though it's complete overkill ;)

Re:VM's

[Shinobi]

I do 3D and compositing as a hobby user: For us, the 30+ year old rule of thumb still holds: "The more disk storage the better, you never have enough RAM, and you will ALWAYS need more CPU"

Re:VM's

[Creepy]

Yeah, I'd say us VM users are definitely more RAM pigs than most. I run a linux VM isolated from my internal network that handles all my external servers (i.e. web server, ssh, etc). My web site gets hit by Chinese hackers every day, so that gives me the peace of mind that they can pretty much do nothing except vandalize the server (which is easily fixed from a VM snapshot, but I do need to find how they breached the server, which has thankfully only happened once).

Re:VM's

[Blaskowicz]

On the other hand if I ran a Windows desktop, 256MB for a linux VM would be plenty to mess around with the shell and so on. Need graphics? Run the X server on Windows.

Re:VM's

[mlts]

The nice thing about VMs is that you can snapshot the compromised instance, roll back and fix a known clean copy, and you still have the ruined one for forensic work. It also keeps the bad stuff away from the bare metal, so even if the VM gets nailed, a simple snapshot rollback will take care of the job.

VMs are more of a "why not" than "why" these days.

Why is this on SlashDot?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> As it turns out, there's not much benefit going beyond 8 GB for regular programs, and surprisingly, 4GB still seems to be enough for gaming in most cases.

Why is this on SlashDot? Or am I in the minority here now because I develop, compile and look at memory dumps on desktops?

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[wonkey_monkey]

and look at memory dumps on desktops?

That sounds like a disgustingly euphemistic photo album.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[jon3k]

This article is a joke. What is a "regular user" and why would slashdot care, when none of us are "regular users" ?

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[FranTaylor]

This article is a joke. What is a "regular user" and why would slashdot care, when none of us are "regular users" ?

Some of us have lives at home (believe it or not) and some of us don't take our work home with us (believe it or not) and we are actually pretty normal users during off-hours.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[FranTaylor]

Oh right, because if I do anything

yes indeed it all revolves around you

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[GungaDan]

Speak for yourself. I use regularly.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[BcNexus]

Two reasons:

The results apply to use cases that many folks encounter. For example: I develop, compile, and occasionally look at memory dumps; but I also support people who use apps (one of the use cases the author tested); and I also play games and use applications (also tested in the experiments) and I support people who do too.

Moreover, this article takes the squishy question of how much RAM is enough and helps answer it with hard numbers and results that can be applied more widely than to just the exact circumstances of the experiments.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[CauseBy]

Personally I use more RAM at home (playing Cities: Skyscapes) than at work (compiling Java in Eclipse). But both machines have 16GB anyway.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[BcNexus]

No one said the experiments tested how much RAM is enough for a so-called "regular user." The article never says that. The article's purpose is to answer the question "Should I get 8GB or 16GB of RAM?".

The author answers the question by running several experiments and giving the reader the results. Most of the Slashdot crowd is proficient enough in computer science to take those results and apply them to their own use cases. That is the value of the article: it gives you information that you can apply to your work or home life.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[Runaway1956]

This article is a joke. What is a "regular user" and why would slashdot care, when none of us are "regular users" ?

Many of us have family. Wives, kids, in-laws, or in some cases, Mom upstairs. Most of those family members come to us for support. Having some idea what a "regular user" does with his/her machine enables us to give decent advice.

Some people on slashdot actually offer that kind of advice professionally. They probably need to know who and what those "regular users" are.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[Ravaldy]

Most of us here serve as IT resources for these "regular users" so it is a good basis to work from. IMHO most experienced IT professionals already know this but seeing other IT professional's opinions can help you update/adjust your view of "minimum requirement".

I'll agree that his definition of "regular user" is ill defined but I can read between the lines and assume he's talking about the 80%: browsing, streaming, word processing, taxes, accounting and ERP. All those to me fit within the "regular user" realm.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[jedidiah]

At home I use pretty much more of everything computing-wise. I also have had much better hardware at home (versus the office) and have for some time.

Re:Why is this on SlashDot?

[steelfood]

Simple: It's a slow news day. Editors need something to rile up the troops to make their daily impression quotas.

Re:For anyone?

[pauljuno]

Wish my computer had 640 GB! But I think Bill said it was 640KB.

ALL THE RAMS

[JoeDuncan]

Easy. ALL the RAM.

Re:ALL THE RAMS

[steelfood]

ARE BELONG TO ME!

commentsubjectsaredumb

[Falos]

Unless you can reverse years in a time machine, the answer is perpetually "More".

Even without games, even if devs are careful, bloat is inevitable. Fire up youtube and MS word at the same time on grandma's machine and you're hanging with every click.

Well yeah, so with many games still 32-bit

[NotDrWho]

I've got a lot of memory that could theortically let me run a bunch of different games at once. But it's not too useful to any *one* of them, since they're almost all still stuck in 32-but world.

Re:Wrong apps to use for a valid test.

[jeffmflanagan]

Browsing the web does not require FireFox. There are many better options, including Waterfox if you're really hooked on Firefox.

Re:For anyone?

[jon3k]

Bill Gates said KB, actually. And the other posters were obviously joking.

Re:For anyone?

[wickedsteve]

I can't tell if this is a joke or a typo.

Seconded

[Jizzbug]

Yup, I find my workstations perform best with 16 GB of RAM, whether I'm developing PHP, JavaScript or Java. Programming IDE + Database IDE + 2 web browsers with tons of tabs open + web server + database server + etc. = lots of swapping under 8 GB of RAM

Re:Seconded

[mwvdlee]

Running Netbeans with a WAMP-server with ~10GB database, 4GB has significant performance problems for me.
8GB runs smooth. Haven tried 16GB as I don't have any need to add more memory.

Obviously, memory requirements are totally dependant on what you do with it.
Games run fine in 4GB, because games are designed to run with 4GB, because 4GB is the current norm. If 8GB becomes the norm, games will start requiring 8GB.

Re:Seconded

[KGIII]

I have a new computer sitting in a box. It has 32 GB of RAM in it. I have a few with 16 GB of RAM. I simply haven't needed more and I haven't felt the urge to set up yet another computer around the house. I was a little high when I ordered it. Stupid pot...

As much as conveniently fits

[m.dillon]

Honestly, these days if it has two memory slots I stuff it with 16GB of ram. If it has four, then 32GB of ram. Simple as that. Hell, I just put together a 'gaming box' for the son of a friend of mine a few weeks ago and thought 16GB would be enough (4x 4GB). I didn't even follow my own rule because I was being cost conscious. The first thing he did with it? Run minecraft with a visibility setting that ate up all 16GB of ram.

Even more important than ram, stuffing a SSD into the box is what really makes everything more responsive. And even if it has to do a bit of paging it's hardly noticeable when its paging to/from a SSD. And if you do both, the box will stay relevant for a very long time, probably 10 years.

But more to the point, why not?

-Matt

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[Lumpy]

If it has 2, I give it 32gb. 4, gets 64gb. Why are you limiting your ram to half its potential? 16GB sticks are affordable.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[cdrudge]

16GB sticks are affordable.

Apparently we have different definitions of what affordable means. At around $100 for a 1x16gb stick of memory, that would be 1/4 what I spent on my last several more than capable computers.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[geekmux]

Honestly, these days if it has two memory slots I stuff it with 16GB of ram. If it has four, then 32GB of ram. Simple as that. Hell, I just put together a 'gaming box' for the son of a friend of mine a few weeks ago and thought 16GB would be enough (4x 4GB). I didn't even follow my own rule because I was being cost conscious. The first thing he did with it? Run minecraft with a visibility setting that ate up all 16GB of ram.

Can't imagine what it feels like to fire up a game that looks like it was ripped out of a 40-year old Atari console and have it take your brand new gaming rig down to it's proverbial knees.

Good times.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[EXrider]

The first thing he did with it? Run minecraft with a visibility setting that ate up all 16GB of ram.

I find this comical, I've never played Minecraft but what I've seen of it looks like the graphics engine was borrowed from the original Castle Wolfenstein 3D. I would've never even thought the game was 64-bit and could address more than 4GB of RAM. From a quick Google search I see that it is Java-based and indeed capable of 64-bit addressing, what could it possibly be doing with that much RAM!?

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[Just Some Guy]

When 16GB RAM kits are less than $100 on Newegg, it inverts the original question: under what circumstances would you possibly not want to max out your RAM?

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[LinuxIsGarbage]

My new machine has 4 slots capable of a total of 32GB. I only put 16GB in. I could barely justify more than 8 with my workload, but I went with 2x8GB modules, so when that starts becoming a bottleneck (but before DDR4 popularity drives up prices of DDR3) I'll buy the other 2x8GB modules.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[Nethead]

I went with 32GB because that's what was in the junk drawer at work. Nice little i7 HP 800 SFF office desk top box, Put in a 480GB SSD and found a great deal on a 5TB drive.

To cap it off, installed ESXi 6.0 and have a hella nice little home lab, domain controler, FreeBSDs, file server, pfSense, FreePBX, OwnCloud, and my IBM Domino & Sametime server (that's another show.)

This desktop is also an HP with 32MB RAM & 480 SSD and two Quatro 600 graphic cards (one for each monitor.) It suits my humble needs.

The company got bought and the new parent is a Dell house so we have to "upgrade" to become standard. I can't wait until next year when all the HP Z820s Xeon workstations become available.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[Lumpy]

Yep $100 a stick is dirt cheap to me. I remember paying well over $900 a stick for ram.

Re:As much as conveniently fits

[toddestan]

It's a world made up of blocks. The blocks are divided up into chunks, which are 16 by 16 blocks, and the world is 256 blocks tall. So you have 65536 blocks per chunk. I The visibility setting is the number of chunks you can "see" (have loaded) at one time, and I think it can up go up to 30 chunks in both directions, not counting the chunk your player is currently in. So you now have 61 by 61 chunks times 65536 blocks per chunk to load into ram. So you now have a few hundred million blocks blocks loaded into memory. I forget how many bytes per block the game needs nowadays, but even if you assume a few bytes per block you're in GB+ territory.

That the game is also written in Java doesn't help matters much either.

All your RAM

[future assassin]

are belong to ME!

Re:For anyone?

[Tablizer]

While it's been difficult to confirm Bill actually said that specific phrase (for K), there is strong evidence he was surprised by how fast new software releases and users "used up" the full 640K, and Microsoft was caught off guard. Venders had to invent their own memory management to go beyond that rather than rely on MS-Dos.

Re:For anyone?

[ihtoit]

III, not IV. There is no IV, his son's name is Rory.

Re:Gaming

[FranTaylor]

If you play games, it might be a good idea to get at least 16GB

How much RAM is necessary if you want to invite your friends over for poker?

How much RAM is enough for developers?

[jgotts]

A better discussion for Slashdot might be how much RAM is enough for developers.

I can barely squeak by on 6 GB, but my next laptop will need to be at least 16 GB, if not 32.

Funnily enough in my current configuration the biggest memory hog isn't VMWare or Oracle. It's Firefox.

  5326 jgotts 20 0 21.584g 1.891g 108628 R 82.1 33.0 287:20.13 firefox

It's sometimes hard for me to determine whether Firefox is working properly or there is a massive bug. I have a fair number of tabs open, but never more than 20.

Re:How much RAM is enough for developers?

[ADRA]

For dev work sure, 16 is pretty good. I'd say 8 was a pretty good sweet spot. I've got 16 on my desktop, 16 on my laptop and 64 on my latest server and only the server comes close to using its capacity (2 DB's and some appservers).

The desktop workload is maybe 10GB when I'm testing a full stack IDE/Client/AppServer/Database, but generally speaking 8GB is generally fine unless I'm really hammering it. Add another couple GB max if I'm doing perf analysis over the full stack, but that's not very often at all.

I don't know if your your top of FF is counting graphics ram (I believe Linux does). My current windows based FF is 600MB with 6 tabs. Still a lot for 6 tabs, but oh well.

Re:How much RAM is enough for developers?

[phantomfive]

Firefox has lots of memory leaks, particularly if you run javascript-heavy sites or flash-emulated javascript.

Javascript code tends to have a lot of memory leaks (because the programmers don't think they have to worry about it). Programmers stick stuff on the DOM, and don't have a way to ever remove it, or they forget to remove things from a hash. If you have to close your Firefox once a week, that's probably what's happening.

Re:How much RAM is enough for developers?

[Kjella]

Depends on what you do. If I want to be debug certain processes on the desktop, 16GB is the minimum for me. This is due to one monolithic ~10GB process in debug mode that is beyond my power to break down into more manageable chunks. Honestly, the question is if you compare it to my salary, is there any reason not to just give me however much I ask for? But budgets and sanity don't mix.

Re:How much RAM is enough for developers?

[Socguy]

Absolutely,

it's kind of sad to see all the posters indignant over an article that tries to determine the 'sweet spot' of RAM for the average user. Almost universally, they fail to recognize that they are not a typical computer user and that the article specifically carves them out.

A rule of thumb before blasting out your complaints should be: If you have a job or a hobby that requires you to to be a heavy, continuous user of photoshop or compression software or some other RAM intensive program THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU!

As much or more than the developer

[AnotherBlackHat]

It's a rare developer indeed that makes software that works well with less RAM than they have.

Re:As much or more than the developer

[techno-vampire]

I did some work, years ago, that had a better way to do it: there was one testing machine that had exactly the minimum specs we were shooting for and if your code didn't run on that machine, it didn't pass. This was back when the 486 was still king, most boxes were lucky to have much more than 640K and if you needed to use overlays, you had to plan them out and build them yourself, so writing tight code was a Good Thing.

Re:As much or more than the developer

[sribe]

It's a rare developer indeed that makes software that works well with less RAM than they have.

What an idiotic argument! Debuggers take memory. Profiling takes memory. Testing for access of previously-freed blocks takes a metric crap load of memory over and above what running the program normally would. And that doesn't even count that it's likely that we're running a database server and application back-end server in addition to the client software. Some days I'm running multiple versions of the back-ends...

Re:4GB ought to be enough for anybody

[bev_tech_rob]

for general purpose desktop use anyways.

For general purpose use (i.e. browsing, email), I agree. Where extra RAM comes in handy is for running more programs CONCURRENTLY without hammering your DASD (whether SSD or HD based) based virtual memory with massive swapping back and forth to disk. More RAM enables you to get more tasks done at the same time. You can be rendering a video while at the same time, browsing the web, working with Quicken, checking email or FB, or even playing a game (assuming your CPU has enough cores/threads to spare). But as cheap as RAM is right now, might as well get as much as you can afford and what your system will accept. Right now I am running 16 GB on my Z97 based system, but have slots open on my motherboard if I ever see the need to double it (or if the memory I have suddenly goes on sale at a ridiculously low price).

It's never *just* RAM, Video Card Biases Results

[eepok]

It's a bit senseless to test whether there's a big difference between regular desktop use is affected by the jump from 4GB to 8GB when you have a a Geforce GTX 980 -- a card that has 4GB of its OWN RAM and costs as much as most people's workstations or home PCs.

Anyone who is running a recently purchased system (within the last 2 years) with only 4GB of RAM is very likely using on-board video as well. Who uses these computers? Rank and file office workers and home users who don't know better.

Getting just about any modern, budget video card will offload graphics work, un-share RAM, and reduce the use of virtual memory. It will make the 4GB stretch a lot farther and 8GB will be plenty for most people. But without that video card, there's just never enough RAM.

So, ya, if you want to say that going from 4GB to 8GB doesn't make a big difference, try making that change without your $500 video card.

Schools

[ledow]

I work in schools (in the UK, that means the standard, mandatory education up to 18, nothing beyond that). Most places I have spoken to are wary of 64-bit, even, so they're still technically running on, what? 3.5Gb or thereabouts?

I have 64-bit throughout so I have 4Gb, but I've seen little reason to go past that. Pretty much the bottleneck is network, and if I get the network up to speed (not cheap), it would be server-side (disk array speed, etc.). The clients very rarely do anything that they aren't waiting for stuff from the network to complete.

Next year, I may go 8Gb in the clients but I would predict to see much huger speed increases by just going to SSD on the client (Lifespan under swap conditions? Meh, drives barely last a year or two for us anyway and then we're replacing the whole machine - overprovision and let it loose and suffer a tiny client hard drive for the sake of speed).

I really need cheap 10Gb kit, though - from server down to end-switch. Gigabit to the desktop is okay for now, but it won't be long. But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. There, yes, fuck, you need as much as you can get. I just doubled all my servers RAM this summer, at great expense. But the clients are running Windows, Office, a few apps and a browser and rarely make it through the day without being logged off or shut down. And we do deal with large databases and centrally-stored stuff all the time, but that's for the server to worry about. The clients, however, need next to nothing.

Re:Schools

[Blaskowicz]

One "upgrade" I did on my PC (the other being switching from Ad Block Plus to ublock) was to switch to stand-by rather than shut down, this preserves the disk cache.
So if I didn't use too much RAM, I can launch VLC and not have to wait for it. What's going on there? VLC hiding a flight simulator in the about screen?
So I wonder if you get Windows to sleep or hibernate rather than shutdown (let's say hibernate and if someone was logged in he/she is kicked out) then you get a preserved disk cache and thus don't wait on crap to load.

(I'm disabling on-disk browser cache, damn those HDD writes :))

Re:Schools

[ledow]

Downloading roaming profiles far outweigh any user-switching or bootup time.

We're on Windows 8. We don't have power-saving (it drives teachers mad that their screens / drives spin down just as they move from class discussion back to the PC), we just logoff and then shutdown at the end of the day.

But the users change EVERY HOUR on the hour, on every PC. So there's not much to linger. However, I guarantee you that roaming profile download takes more time than anything else the machine might do in the course of a day.

Re:Schools

[Blaskowicz]

Bloody horror.
And I wondered why you would ever need gbaseT on the desktop. Roaming profiles never crossed my mind. I have just one repressed memory of it on a then very new and powerful PC (damn thing had to create the profile I assume and it took an eon or two. Then I logged out and back to dumb graphical *nix terminals)

Re:Schools

[Blaskowicz]

Thanks for that story, it's fun somewhat. Really mundane and really demanding things at once.

Re: Schools

[RR]

But RAM? Hell, 4Gb is fine for basically any business task unless it's a server. ... The clients, however, need next to nothing.

Coming from the 640k days, I still react with astonishment when somebody calls 4 million kB "next to nothing."

Easy formula...

[kimgkimg]

Budget / (Largest RAM Sticks * # of slots)

Shitty JavaScript == massive memory leaks

[Jizzbug]

A single tab using 300 MB for its JavaScript scratchpad isn't uncommon these days, even tabs whose scratchpads grow by the second. This tab is consuming 36 MB currently (up from 32 MB a few minutes ago), with a single poorly-designed ad consuming 4 MB alone. Resource usage on this tab appears to be growing at about 1 MB per minute due to shitty JavaScript on the page.

I used to keep Slashdot open in a tab all day, everyday, but not anymore. I have to close Slashdot frequently to clear up its huge memory leaks.

Re:Shitty JavaScript == massive memory leaks

[Jizzbug]

Hahaha, lol, love the sarcasm ;) ... ABP and ABE are known to dramatically increase memory usage: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/

Re:It's never *just* RAM, Video Card Biases Result

[eepok]

Ugh... my kingdom for after-posting editing capability.

ECC

[Spazmania]

I just wish I could buy desktops that supported ECC memory. A decade ago I could and I did.

My most recent desktop has 32 gigs of ram. With firefox alone routinely climbing to 2.5 gigs, I don't see how anybody could survive on only 4. Well, use fewer tabs I guess. But that's just how I roll -- the tabs stay open until I no longer care about their contents.

Re:ECC

[markus]

Look into the "workstation" offerings from PC vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. They all tend to accept ECC memory. I think, the Dell T7610 that I bought recently takes up to 256GB of ECC memory, although I currently only have 32GB in it.

If you don't need the absolute latest model and/or if you are OK with a "scratch & dent" computer, you can often find amazing deals. With a little bit of shopping, I have regularly found top of the line Dell workstations for about 30% off list price. Hypothetically, if I split it for parts and sold just the RAID controller and the CPU online, I'd already make all my money back. And that's not even mentioning the included 3 year next-business-day on-site service contract.

I have generally had great luck with my Dell purchases. Their high-end professional models aren't as cheap as a bottom-of-the-barrel PC from Best Buy. But the extra money does give you a much better machine; better performance, much better reliability, and just a really well-thought-out design. I find, I often use my computers for 6+ years before they are retired entirely. That kind of amortizes the cost.

Re:ECC

[LVSlushdat]

Which is why my current desktop machine is a Dell Precision Workstation, its an older model, still on DDR2 ram, but takes up to 24GB, and supports ECC.. It came with a Quadcore Xeon, and an Nvidia Quadro workstation-grade graphics card and does Linux perfectly. Does everything I need on 12GB of ram, but have the room to take it up to 24GB should I need more "room"... Nice part was the machine was $300, about 2 years ago... Can't beat the offlease refurb'ed Dells for good value....

Re:ECC

[drinkypoo]

I just wish I could buy desktops that supported ECC memory. A decade ago I could and I did.

You can put unregistered ECC into a lot of systems which don't say they support it. Allegedly it's possible to run it on my 990FX-based Gigabyte board. I decided I didn't really care enough to sacrifice speed for capacity; I got 16GB of high-speed memory for about what 8GB of slower ECC would have cost, and I was sure it would be compatible.

Re:ECC

[Agripa]

Look into the "workstation" offerings from PC vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. They all tend to accept ECC memory.

Or if you build your ownn ECC support is not hard to come by.

For AMD the additional cost is just that of the RAM. For Intel the motherboard and processor will be 2 to 3 times more expensive.

Elated to depressed

[Godwin O'Hitler]

I have 6GB which serves me fine so when I read the article I was going YAY!
Then you bastards just had to spoil it for me didn't you.

Re:Gaming

[ihtoit]

why? Most games are still 32-bit. I can count the number of 64-bit PC titles I'm aware of on one hand and still have three fingers and a thumb left.

32-bit games will use a MAXIMUM of 4GB. If you're on a 64-bit system with 8GB RAM, great for you, your game will use all the memory it needs up to the 32-bit hard limit - 4GB. If you're on a 32-bit system, it won't address more than 4GB RAM anyway, so the maximum amount of memory available for your game will be 4GB-overhead (usually around 1.5GB for the system)

Unless you're running some huge 64-bit database or render, you shouldn't need more than 8GB. And if your browser is eating a Gig just to display a page, you've got bigger problems than how many slots are occupied.

Re:For anyone?

[Firethorn]

I heard that he actually said it, but that it's also taken out of context - he was doing a 'next 5 years' prediction, and the 640k held for the next 4 or so, so he was actually 'close'. (I know, only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades)

Re:4GB ought to be enough for anybody

[ModernGeek]

Until there is something that normal desktop users would use (no, not workstations), I would like to see it stay around 4GB so that people writing applications for desktop users don't do horrible things that are solved by throwing more RAM at the problem.

The iPhone has had a small amount of RAM since the start, and this has changed only slightly, and it's been for the better.

8GB Minimum

[sims 2]

If I was buying a desktop computer for someone to run msft word on I would still get one that had a minimum on 8GB of ram.

laptops 4GB absolute minimum do not buy less or windows updates will give you problems!

As for myself any system I use on a daily basis always has the ram maxed out.

Whatever happens to be the most that will fit in the machine.

Never enough amps

[Anonymous Coward]

My work computer has 256GB and 64 core. I consider that the bare minimum for work. When the processing kicks in, the fans ramp up and sounds like a jet getting ready to take off. Then the work ends and it gets quiet again. We've estimated we've reduced an 8+ hour job down to ~10 minutes.

Re:8GB?

[BitZtream]

You do realize that you can't buy an 8gb mid or high end laptop from Apple right? only way you get 8gb is if you buy a low end model, all the others just come with 16 or more on the desktop.

%@$#^$ing Chrome

[Sevalecan]

I had 8GB in my desktop and was occasionally running out of memory due to either Chrome or Firefox(I didn't have swap activated). I upgraded to 16GB to alleviate this problem, which it didn't. I run out of memory just as frequently thanks to shitty browsers. Aside from that, yeah 16GB would be plenty for me. I just recently activated 2GB of swap to give me a little bit of time to kill Chrome myself before OOMkiller took over and froze my machine for an indefinite amount of time.

Tested: 1)Apps; 2)Games running alongside Chrome

[BcNexus]

They tested running a single game? That is incorrect. They didn't test the system by simply doing that and only that.

TechSpot tested three different games, each running alongside Chrome with 65 active tabs. That simulated concurrently running (AKA multitasking) RAM-hungry applications.

And before they even tested concurrent multitasking with games, TechSpot first tested the system with Blender and other applications, simulating app use.

Did you RTFA?

Going from 4GB to 8GB...

[__aaclcg7560]

I've been using 4GB for the last seven years since I last rebuilt my PC for Windows Vista. Now that I'm re-building my PC to replace aging components, 8GB has become the new 4GB. The new motherboard I'm planning to get will max out at 32GB. We will see what the next seven years bring.

Re:4GB ought to be enough for anybody

[Runaway1956]

That seemed to be true, but I found myself getting close to "running out" more and more often on my desktop. When the wife decided to upgrade, the only advice I gave her was to consider 8G of memory to be a minimum. She does use more than half of that memory - primarily because she never seems to close a browser tab, or an application.

Re:Gaming

[CauseBy]

Not a lot, but at least one of these and case of these is a good start.

Memory is useful

[linuxgurugamer]

One word: RAMDisk
Two words: Disk Cache

I have 32 gig of memory on my system. 16 wasn't enough, i was running out of memory. with 32, I have an 8 gig ramdisk which I load my games onto (I'm only actively playing one at a time, so if I switch games, I load another). While I don't need it because of extremely fast D drive (RAID 10, 8 drives) and an SSD C drive, a good disk cache is also useful in reducing access time.

It really depends on how much disk access you need to do. I'm writing some mods for a game, and found that when I started compiling on the RAM disk the compile times dropped significantly.

32 GB is enough... so far

[sideslash]

I run my Hackintosh in VMware along with other operating system instances. (To be fair, the article cited virtualization as an exception to its otherwise disturbingly skimpy recommendation.)

Re:For anyone?

[Archangel Michael]

The problem for Bill, was that he built his OS bounded on two sides. Bottom was 0, and the top was hard bounded to 640k, because that is where they put the Video (IIRC) and Bios Memory. Had they put that memory next to 0, and freed up 384 to 1 MB, then we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today.

I think Bill thought that the computer would be designed for a short period, and replaced with a new kind. The problem was the new kind came, and it was still hard bounded by 640k limit (with some fancy hacking to get around it). Anyone running a memory manager at that time knows what a cluster it all was, as we couldn't use more than 640k.

Short sighted people make short sighted errors.

Re:For anyone?

[Ichijo]

"Nobody will ever need more than 2 colors." --Steve Jobs

Power user on Mac, need lots of RAM

[Theovon]

Sometimes, the 16GB I have in my MacBook Pro isn't enough. However, that's primarily due to Safari being a horrible memory pig. I've had "safari web content" processes baloon up to 14GB.

Of course.

[danbob999]

When you run a single application or game, 8 GB is enough. You need 16 GB (or even more) for running many applications at once.
Also, RAM is not cheap these days. 16 GB is more expensive now than it was 3 years ago when I bought my desktop. 57% more in Canada.

Re:Of course.

[Whorhay]

That's what I was thinking as well, on the cost front. I built my current PC a few years ago and periodically I have checked to see if I can get another couple sticks of the RAM I'm using. And so far I've never found it cheaper, and in fact yesterday it was 20% more than it was when I bought it.

I've only very recently started having memory issues, using only 8GB. I've been hosting a dedicated server for an alpha game, running a client of the same game, and of course running sundry other applications like Firefox.

The memory usage of Firefox really confounds me. It's just a web browser. Most of the time I have less than half a dozen tabs open, only one of which is a social or streaming site. Most web pages should be pretty light on the memory footprint, and even the streaming ones should only have a few minutes of video buffered at a time anyways.

Re:Of course.

[danbob999]

Hard drives are also very expensive these days.

640 Kb?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Some one said 640 KB should be enough.

People repeatedly say "Gamers!" as the people who need high performance machines. I laugh at them. Gaming machines are probably the most powerful machines owned by real people. But when it comes to corporations... It is us the physics simulation people who solve partial differential equations who need really heavy hardware. Heck, we pack 8 graphics cards, yes 8 individual cards on special purpose mother boards, into one server that does not even have a monitor. Yes, we are that insane. All these GPUs think they are rendering polygons, but we trick them into solving chemically reacting fluids flow.

My desktop right now has 64 GB. But my test machines are 256 GB 32 processor machines one linux and one windows. But that is only for small jobs that I test my code in stand alone mode. Integrated with the full simulation, we generally would need a high performance cluster.

Re:Gaming

[lgw]

Yep: my gaming rig has 6 GB of memory (it's old - my vid card has nearly as much now), and no page file. I've never had a problem with any game due to memory limits. A 32-bit game in Windows is, for all practical purposes, limited to ~3 GB, as both the kernel and a "memory window" to send data up to the video card need a range of addresses.

Game AIs that are both CPU and memory hogs are starting to emerge, however, as game developers grow into using multiple threads. I wouldn't expect the current situation to last forever, so I'll go to 16 GB or so when I build my next gaming rig; though I'm not in any hurry there, as my current still benchmarks in the top 10% (of people enthusiast-enough to run the benchmark). Amazing how much life a new video card adds to a gaming system.

Re:For anyone?

[Creepy]

Gates denies it, and the quote was more like "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and if he said it, it was referring to a specific machine at a trade show. The quote that is said to be claimed to be out of context is Ken Olson's "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

You just reminded me of a button in the 1980s that said "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, shit fights, and nuclear weapons." That and "Cthulhu in '88 - why settle for the lesser evil?" which is popping up again for the 2016 elections were two of my favorites.

Re:Can get by with around 4GB

[Runaway1956]

Virtual machines are precisely the reason I bought this huge extended ATX board, with 16 slots for memory. I only have 24 gig of memory installed, but there's room for - uhhhh - 128 gig. What I have allows me to run up to four VM's at a time, as well as putting all my /tmp files and caches into ram.

Re:It's never *just* RAM, Video Card Biases Result

[Runaway1956]

Good point. No, excellent point. My video isn't a state-of-the-art card, but it has 2 gig of memory, AND the GPU's are faster than my CPU's. So, yeah, my monster machine would probably be more of a dog without that video card installed. The onboard video is by definition a POS.

Get a Celeron or AMD and 8GB RAM

[Blaskowicz]

A few years ago came the Celeron G1610 and it's insanely fast for bottom of the barrel price and low heat, same deal with the current G1820 or G1840, higher tech at the same price. Or throw a bone at AMD and get an A4 6300, A6 6400K etc. from them.

Most people probably ponder between an i3, i5 or i7 but if you don't know why you need it, then you don't need it! Even editing a web picture or a greeting card once a year on warez photoshop will not stress the CPU, as it sits idle between clicks and key presses and you'll wait like 10 seconds for something to apply which is good enough.

On the other hand RAM quantity has always been the bottleneck, 2GB RAM is huge, but quickly wasted by the OS and browser. So get 8GB RAM while it's still cheap : prices have come down. May be a good idea to get a motherboard with four RAM slots so you're not stuck years from now, or to get 16GB off the bat if you feel concerned or really want a two slot mobo.
Even the integrated GPU is high tech, and does not slow down the PC : it sits on an insanely fast on-die bus and doesn't really steal the ample bandwith from the CPU.

Other rambling : I'll choose 8GB RAM and a HDD over 4GB RAM and an SSD, especially if the latter is a gamble on a lower end model.
Celeron with 16GB may get more things done than i7 and 4GB depending on use.
If you didn't spend enough money, think of the peripherals : a $1000 computer with $10 speakers is not worth using, personally.

Then software hygiene keeps the PC fast running for 10 years.

Re:For anyone?

[Ravaldy]

Short sighted people make short sighted errors.

Most people foresee the future by looking at the past so it's not as obvious as you would think. Those who have the gift of foresight end up joining the million dollar club because they're ahead of the curve. Most of us just follow what they lay in front of us.

My opinion of the situation is that the decision was made with financials in mind (keep the cost low) and using the existing architecture "for now" was good enough. They could NOT have known that their temporary design would end up feeding into a standard need caused by the popularization of an OS.

The "640 kB is enough" is a myth attributed . The blame for this should actually be placed at IBM's feet

From this wiki: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
More about Bill Gates and this comment about 640K: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Unleash the Power of the Pyramid!

[xenotransplant]

With 50L of memory and an available booster! from the Office

Re:Gaming

[pslytely psycho]

While you are correct that most are still 32 bit, that is changing rapidly. Especially in the last two years. Just a couple of years ago WOW, Euro Truck Simulator, Thief, Crysis and very few others would of been your list. Today however :

        ARK: Survival Evolved
        Assassin's Creed Rogue
        Assassin's Creed Syndicate
        Assassin's Creed Unity
        Batman: Arkham Knight
        Battlefield 4
        Battlefield: Hardline
        Black Gold: Online
        Bladestorm: Nightmare
        Call of Duty: Advanced Warfighter
        Call of Duty: Black Ops III
        Call of Duty: Ghosts
        Carmageddon: Reincarnation
        Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior
        The Crew
        Dead Rising 3
        Dirty Bomb
        Dragon Age: Inquisition
        Dragon Ball Xenoverse
        Dying Light
        The Evil Within
        Evolve
        F1 2014
        F1 2015
        Fallout 4
        Far Cry 4
        FIFA 15
        Galactic Civilization 3
        Grand Theft Auto V
        Hatred
        Killing Floor 2
        Landmark
        Lords of the Fallen
        Metal Gear Solid V
        Metro 2033 Redux
        Metro Last Light Redux
        Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
        Monument
        Mortal Kombat X
        NBA 2K15
        Need for Speed: Rivals
        Rainbow Six: Siege
        Ryse: Son of Rome
        StarCitizen
        Star Wars: Battlefront
        TitanFall
        Toukiden: Kiwami
        Watch Dogs
        Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
        Wolfenstein: The New Order
        Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
        WWE 2K15

This is the direction the industry is heading. I personally would not build a gaming system today without a minimum of 16GB.

source: https://hardcore-games.azurewebsites.net/wp/game-64.php

Did he?

[John Bokma]

If you actually read the article....

I ran out of 8 gigs of ram all the time...

[Karmashock]

... gaming mostly. But it happened in other situations. I'm a really heavy multitasker. I have dozens of programs running at the same time. Long story short, 16 gigs needed to happen to make the pain go away.

Re:I ran out of 8 gigs of ram all the time...

[tompaulco]

I have 8 GB of RAM, and am using 93% of it. However, when I look at the top consumers of RAM, the top ones are ones that have no business using that much RAM. Firefox is using 1.4 GB, that is just not right. I have 25 tabs open, so I could see it using maybe 25 MB. Skype is using 186 MB, no excuse for why Skype should need more than a few MB. My Asus system configuration utility is using 523 MB, no reason for that at all. Eclipse is using 507 MB with nothing running and 5 or 6 projects open. No reason for that. Bluestacks is using 387 MB. No reason it should be using more than 20 or 30 MB. Browser Configuration Utility is using 200 MB, no reason for it to even be running. If all of these were using appropriate amounts of memory, then I could run in under 4 GB, but the writers of these software products are unable to contain their memory leaks.
By comparison, SQL Server is also running and only uses about 80 MB of memory.

Re:I ran out of 8 gigs of ram all the time...

[Karmashock]

I agree, some kind of memory partitioning would make some sense.

People say "there's no reason why you shouldn't use all your ram"... the problem is that if all this shit is using it up then it isn't free for when I want to launch something that is going to gobble 4 gigs.... justifiably.

The thing I find the most distressing is that the ram numbers don't add up anymore. Even if you add all the categories of ram together it doesn't make any sense. Windows fragments the list of ram usage into "working", "private", etc... and so its hard to know ALL the ram X is using. I've found system services are often gobbling a gig or two.

Windows ram management is shit frankly... at least to the extent that it wastes ram profligately. If they actually reduced the ram a program got when they needed more ram for something else, I'd say fine. But in practice it doesn't happen.

So whatever... 16 gigs and it doesn't bother me.

Re:8GB?

[CavemanKiwi]

Hey hey, I will have none of that cheek! /Super offended

Re:For anyone?

[Socguy]

Actually, I believe it was only 64KB...

Re:For anyone?

[Hognoxious]

So his grandad was an asshat but his father was OK?

Hmm, perhaps I'm getting mixed up with the Star Trek movies.

Funny this should pop up now

[roc97007]

I use Adobe Lightroom a lot. It's the main use of my primary computer. I've noticed that with each update it seems to be allocating more and more memory. Well, so does Firefox and Chrome, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Point is, just last weekend I noticed that with 8 GB installed (Win 7 64 bit) I'm running out of RAM when simultaneously uploading two photos, working on a third, and have Firefox on the taskbar. (Which is my usual workflow.) I've worked around by not having any apps open except Lightroom when I'm using it, but I suspect this is only a stopgap. 8 GB isn't enough anymore. (Also, 10 GB/sec upload isn't enough anymore...)

All your RAM is belong to Adobe

[KatchooNJ]

What about the biggest, popular RAM hog around? Good ole Photoshop... I don't think you can ever have enough RAM if you are doing some serious work in Photoshop. All your RAM is belong to Adobe.

I've been running out @ 8GiB with Windows 10

[_KiTA_]

Anecdotal evidence here, mind you, but I've had a few instances of running out of memory with Windows 10 and running a lot of things at the same time. Specifically, modded Minecraft (Pathfinder pack on the Curse Launcher) + Chrome, with the random IM programs I always keep open (Pidgin, Trillian, Hexchat IRC, and Skype).

It seems like a lot but I never had ram issues in Windows 8.1. Take that what you will. I personally plan on tossing another 8 gigs in when I have a chance.

There's more to desktops than Gaming...

[ndykman]

Sure, PC gaming tends to drive the high end market, but there are people that can use as much memory as you can get.

I just finished a new PC build. When I was looking at DDR4 memory, I decided to spend the extra 180 to go from 32G to 64G. Here's the thing. 32G of DDR4 2133 memory was 180 bucks. Memory is not nearly as expensive as PC manufacturers make it.

I know gamers are really obsessed with memory speeds and will pay a very large premium for higher clock speeds on everything. But, some of us do development and other PC tasks and need all the memory for VMs and so on, and we don't overclock because we choose stability over trying to get the last extra FPS out of a game.

90% of the time 4 GB is enough

[Moof123]

Even 8 GB is good enough for >95% of the days. Still, I run big nasty electromagnetic simulations a few times a quarter that run into the 20-50 GB usage ballpark. So I have 64 GB of RAM. Probably cost the company about a grand, but being unable to run those sims would cost them much more.

Engineer time is the most expensive budget item.
License costs are next.
Workstation hardware is the lowest cost by a pretty big margin.

Obviously that order varies a lot depending on the type of work you do, but I am often amazed by companies who have 6 figure employees who are required to use ancient laptops and small monitors to save a few bucks, when lost productivity often outweighs those costs at least ten to one.

Re:For anyone?

[Tablizer]

Short sighted people make short sighted errors.

A more relevant question is if a long-term focus is profitable. If MS makes memory management screwy, then they have more control over how it's solved, giving them more control over the market.

Investment theory generally dissuades longer-term thinking (for typical conditions), for good or bad.

Re:Gaming

[Dutch Gun]

Even several years ago, game developers were hitting pretty hard against the constraints of 32-bit memory limitations. The only reason they didn't switch to 64-bit gaming was that too many people were still were running 32-bit OSes on their otherwise perfectly capable 64-bit systems.

Nowadays, it just doesn't make sense to constrain the entire game because of technology holdouts like that. Games are incredibly resource intensive, and will gladly consume all the RAM you'll give it.

Re:Gaming

[Khyber]

" If you're on a 32-bit system, it won't address more than 4GB RAM anyway"

Someone's never heard of PAE.

Re:quarter as much

[hackwrench]

I thought he meant to include the price of the MacBook Pro in addition to the SSD when he said "a quarter as much". And for the entire Dell machine, not just an upgrade for a Dell.

ECC RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for years: ECC is of limited utility. It will only catch problems when the bit flips in memory. That's exceedingly rare. Most problems occur with timing issues and the wrong data being written to RAM. ECC will happily validate the wrong data.

There was a problem many years ago with, I believe it was an alpha emitter, being including in the RAM packaging. That caused all sorts of grief and bitflips. But these days, ECC is not really worth it unless you're extremely high end with a LOT of money at stake.

For your money, you are better off overbuying your RAM. Buy RAM rated at 1866 and run it at 1600. That solves a lot of headaches! I've seen more than my share of oddball timing issues. Every one got fixed by overbuying RAM.

Not much unless there's a good reason

[Mr.CRC]

I put my current machine together a year ago with a i4790k, and a decent mobo. Installed LinuxMint 17. Then I did a little test. I ran everything I normally do at once, including VMware with 4GB of potential RAM, running AutoCAD and some other crap, in Linux running LibreOffice, Firefox with dozens of vids playing, mp3 players, Thunderbird, and half of the KDE apps. I think I finally got it near 4GB. So I added another 4GB.

If I was doing heavy media editing, maybe more could help. Or heavy computations, which I don't do much anymore. 4GB would not be an obstacle for general office, browsing, and fooling around. This machine is mostly an indulgence, since there is little perceivable increase in UI performance vs. the dual core 3GHz/4GB one it replaced.

Because one process should be enough for everyone

[iamacat]

Try running everything in TFA simultaneously and then see if you think 8GB or even 16GB is enough. In Java development workflow, it's common to have half a dozen VMs around, each needing 1-2GB for optimum performance. It's very helpful to have your sources, compiled classes and dependency jars in filesystem hash to avoid reading them from SSD on every build. Now edit a few high resolution images and open browser with dozens of tabs to read various documentation and tell me how much memory you would rather have.

16 is my sweet spot

[RubberDogBone]

All three of my PCs run Windows 10 and 16GB, with an SSD for boot. Windows itself needs about 4GB to run happily. Windows 7 suffered below 4. Windows 8.1 was OK with 4 but happier with more. 10 is even happier with 4. So 4 is what I would call base.

8 if planning to run programs or do much of anything. Games or Chrome will suck this up.

16 is what I run, because I run virtual machines from time to time and each one gets 4GB dedicated ram. No matter what I do, or which PC I happen to be on, I always have enough for the VM to run without compromise. Currently the VMs are Windows 7 Pro so 4GB is just what they need.

16 also comes in handy for gaming -two of the boxes have late model 4GB Nvidia GPUs so there's really very little I cannot run. Also do occasional video editing in Sony Vegas Pro 13 which makes heavy use of the GPU ans system memory for rendering. So all in all, 16 is where I want to be.

Re:For anyone?

[ihtoit]

How many of those are there now, and do we count the George Lazenby one?

Wait. Strike that. I've gotten trapped in a Franchise Drift.

Re:Gaming

[ihtoit]

I have heard of PAE but that doesn't help 32-bit applications which can still not address more than 4GB of memory. Or chipsets which are limited to 36-bit (including the NX bit), which is still for all practical purposes a hard 4GB limit for kernel and application software. Your 64-bit database is still going to hit that 4GB limit on a Pentium Pro (which was the first processor to ship with PAE, and yes it is still x86-32) even if the system itself is fully stocked with RAM (with the P6 the ceiling was 64GB addressable)

Re: 16GB in the Java Space is very nice

[canistel]

Your devs are a bunch of hacks. No developer needs 64 gigs of ram. You just know your project is going to end up on the daily wtf one day...

Application RAM usage is not a constant

[Shirley Marquez]

Measuring the RAM usage of some applications is tricky because the application adapts to how much RAM is available. Chrome with lots of open tabs is a notable example. If you have tons of memory it will keep all the tabs in RAM fully rendered; switching to another tab is very fast. If you start to run short of memory it will start to discard the rendered versions of tabs; if you switch back to a tab like that Chrome now has to redo the layout, and that takes a bit longer. If things get really desperate it will even throw away the page source (unlikely on a computer but it does happen on the mobile version), which means a reload and possibly a long wait.

Re:Gaming

[Khyber]

"I have heard of PAE but that doesn't help 32-bit applications which can still not address more than 4GB of memory."

Plenty of 32-bit games that can utilize PAE. STALKER being one of them. All you do is write the code to detect PAE and utilize it when necessary.

Even my 32-bit MUCK game can address 6GB RAM, as it is fully aware of PAE.

As long as it runs...

[pubwvj]

As long as it runs X-Plane really well we're golden...

Is there any other purpose or test of desktop computers? The gold standard.

I always max the memory right out of the gate

[Hohlraum]

Wait a bit for the current gen to mature and the memory prices to come down. Then max that sucker out.

as always, depends what you need

[Chirs]

I've got a Dell Vostro that's pushing 5 years old. I paid $440 (Canadian) for it. It does everything I need it to, because it's main purpose in life is web browsing, email, word processing, and exporting streaming video via HDMI to my home theater.

For that purpose any of the Mac lineup would be overkill.

So sure, *at comparable specs* the Mac pricing is competetive. But many people just don't need those specs, and for those people a Mac is simply overpriced.

Re:Gaming

[ihtoit]

a: not all at once, and b: it's still a 32-bit process that CANNOT address more than 4GB of memory at any given instant. All PAE does is extend the ability for the application to swap "out of range" banks in to the page table while keeping the content of the swapped-out banks intact. A 64-bit kernel doesn't need to do this as it already has the page bandwidth to deal with the extended page table, similarly for a 64-bit application. You can, therefore, run a 32-bit app in a 64-bit kernelspace but it will swap out as much as it did in the 32-bit environment the second it hits that 4GB limit. To stop the swapping, all you need to do is recode the app for 64-bit.

Re:For anyone?

[Agripa]

The problem for Bill, was that he built his OS bounded on two sides. Bottom was 0, and the top was hard bounded to 640k, because that is where they put the Video (IIRC) and Bios Memory. Had they put that memory next to 0, and freed up 384 to 1 MB, then we wouldn't have a lot of the problems we have today.

I think Bill thought that the computer would be designed for a short period, and replaced with a new kind. The problem was the new kind came, and it was still hard bounded by 640k limit (with some fancy hacking to get around it). Anyone running a memory manager at that time knows what a cluster it all was, as we couldn't use more than 640k.

Short sighted people make short sighted errors.

This had nothing to do with Bill or his operating system or even with the IBM PC design; it has to do with how the 8086 works.

The 8086 interrupt vector table starts at 00000h so that area has to be RAM if the system is going to be flexibly programmable. The 8086 reset vector is located at FFFF0h (16 bytes before the end of the 1MB address space) so that area has to be ROM.

Given the above, the most natural memory arrangement is to have a continuous block of RAM start at the beginning of the address space and have a ROM located at the end of address space with memory mapped I/O located toward the end of the address space before the ROM which is exactly what they ended up with.