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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.
The more RAM I have, the better.
Your game might have a limited memory footprint, but my entropy analysis algorithms do not.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Who the hell voted *that* the be-all and end-all measure of need in desktop RAM???
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
RAM beyond 8G, if not used for programs will be used to cache disk and any time you can cache disk you win.
Nobody will ever need more than 640 GB of memory. - William Gates
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...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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?"
>> 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?
Easy. ALL the RAM.
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Bill Gates said KB, actually. And the other posters were obviously joking.
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
with prevalence of SSD, disk cache is
even more important to minimize the number of writes.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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?
It's a rare developer indeed that makes software that works well with less RAM than they have.
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.
Ugh... my kingdom for after-posting editing capability.
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
Bye!
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?
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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!
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.