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

[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

[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

[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

[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:For anyone?

[linear a]

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

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?"

ALL THE RAMS

[JoeDuncan]

Easy. ALL the RAM.

Re:For anyone?

[jon3k]

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

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.

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: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!