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