# RAM size matters, A LOT



## xkm1948 (Jun 2, 2016)

When i started off my quest of getting 128gb of ram most people were questioning me how the heck would some one use that much amount of ram? Well today i have to use my lab computer for some quick job, and it crashed within 5 minutes. This is with 8gb of ram. 

Just some basic workload will eat up to 50GB of RAM. And this is only a tiny sized sample. 

Hopefully 256GB ram will be available soon.


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## ERazer (Jun 2, 2016)

do you use 50gb everyday?


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## ZenZimZaliben (Jun 2, 2016)

Very Random Thread...But yeah RAM amount matters, but that amount is all relative to the users environment and what they are doing.


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## Toothless (Jun 2, 2016)

The epeen is strong.


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## tabascosauz (Jun 2, 2016)

While the whole shebang about lab simulations genuinely needing 128GB doesn't apply to most users, it is true that 8GB is no longer the standard for "comfortably multitasking and playing games". Quite a few games in the past few years (GTA V and Far Cry 4 come to mind for me) make poor use of RAM and come with unavoidable memory leaks.

Unless one only wishes to use their PC for accessing the web (disregarding Chrome's RAM habits) and writing word documents, the standard is essentially at 16GB, although it will take most users a few years to catch up.

But seriously, what are you trying to prove? You've already had that lengthy discussion about needing 128GB RAM for your simulations; no one had a problem with your 128GB RAM to begin with, so who are you proving "wrong"?


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## Naito (Jun 2, 2016)

Toothless said:


> The epeen is strong.



It's about how you use it.


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## Toothless (Jun 2, 2016)

Naito said:


> It's about how you use it.


But it's like religion; you don't have to flaunt it.


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## hat (Jun 2, 2016)

Well sure, if you run some shit like that it's going to eat RAM. But, most people aren't running whatever software it is you're running that's using that amount of RAM. 8GB is fine for me at the moment, but if building a new system I'd recommend 16GB, unless, of course, you run some ram-gluttonous software.


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## xkm1948 (Jun 2, 2016)

tabascosauz said:


> While the whole shebang about lab simulations genuinely needing 128GB doesn't apply to most users, it is true that 8GB is no longer the standard for "comfortably multitasking and playing games". Quite a few games in the past few years (GTA V and Far Cry 4 come to mind for me) make poor use of RAM and come with unavoidable memory leaks.
> 
> Unless one only wishes to use their PC for accessing the web (disregarding Chrome's RAM habits) and writing word documents, the standard is essentially at 16GB, although it will take most users a few years to catch up.
> 
> But seriously, what are you trying to prove? You've already had that lengthy discussion about needing 128GB RAM for your simulations; no one had a problem with your 128GB RAM to begin with, so who are you proving "wrong"?



Welp, mainly because i never thought it would crash my lab computer. I was expecting it to be extremely slow for a 8gb. But completely crash it really surprised me.


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## ZenZimZaliben (Jun 2, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> Welp, mainly because i never thought it would crash my lab computer. I was expecting it to be extremely slow for a 8gb. But completely crash it really surprised me.



Increase your page file to avoid the crashing..it will be slow as hell though..assuming your running windows or you know how to do that in other os's.


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## D007 (Jun 3, 2016)

If you were just playing games, 8 would be fine.. Virtually no on needs 256 gb of ram though..


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## cdawall (Jun 3, 2016)

I have 64GB in my home machine that runs dumb things. My gaming rig has 16 it does fine, my work PC has 32 it also does fine


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## cadaveca (Jun 3, 2016)

D007 said:


> If you were just playing games, 8 would be fine.. Virtually no on needs 256 gb of ram though..


8 GB does not meet my needs for gaming. I've been testing a 3866 MHz 8 GB kit and although some things are nice and fast... it's just not enough. 12 GB, sure, but we can't buy 12 GB kits.


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## cdawall (Jun 3, 2016)

cadaveca said:


> 8 GB does not meet my needs for gaming. I've been testing a 3866 MHz 8 GB kit and although some things are nice and fast... it's just not enough. 12 GB, sure, but we can't buy 12 GB kits.



Depends how old your rig in plenty of X58 chug along with 12GB kits in them


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## natr0n (Jun 3, 2016)

16gb is a nice sweet spot for me at least.


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## ZeDestructor (Jun 3, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> When i started off my quest of getting 128gb of ram most people were questioning me how the heck would some one use that much amount of ram? Well today i have to use my lab computer for some quick job, and it crashed within 5 minutes. This is with 8gb of ram.
> 
> Just some basic workload will eat up to 50GB of RAM. And this is only a tiny sized sample.
> 
> Hopefully 256GB ram will be available soon.



You may want to look into E5 Xeons, that support 128GB LRDIMMs (up 12 LRDIMMs per CPU, upto 2 CPUs per machine with the common E5-2600 series, 4 with the 4600) already right now. You could also consider the crazier E7s, but those are way too impractical for workstation use.


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## RejZoR (Jun 3, 2016)

Only time I realistically need 32GB of RAM is when I'm compressing data with 7zip using all 12 threads. And if I happen to run 2 VM's at once and still need plenty of RAM for the host. And that's about it in my case. I just got it because it was rather cheap and I'm future proof because I need 4 sticks for quad channel and it slightly complicates things. Not as much as triple channel on X58 but still.


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## ViperXTR (Jun 3, 2016)

In our case, SpatialNET eats tons of ram and 8GB is chugging and crashing lel,


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## FordGT90Concept (Jun 3, 2016)

I wrote a program that I've seen eat 18 GiB of RAM (could theoretically consume unlimited amounts of RAM given a complex enough problem) and it wasn't done yet and I have 16 GiB.  RAM is one of those things that, if you have excess, it is wasted money, but if you don't have enough for what you're doing, it really pays off to upgrade.


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## Caring1 (Jun 3, 2016)

I can see the average home user needing and using more ram if they crunch or fold as you can assign how much is used.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jun 3, 2016)

BOINC/F@H don't use much memory.  I gave it 2 GiB to play with and it never went over 512 MiB running 8 tasks.  They are CPU intensive, not memory intensive.


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## xorbe (Jun 3, 2016)

Multiple vbox sessions can chew through ram in a hurry.


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## d265f2785 (Oct 17, 2016)

I'm with you op, more ram = better.


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## Aquinus (Oct 17, 2016)

In PostgreSQL, more memory means you can tweak memory usage for certain things or scale out better to more connections. Being able to allocate more to work_mem means fewer chunks to go through when doing JOINs or complex WHEREs or being able to allocate more to maintenance_work_mem which will enable faster building of indexes or imports of data, all of which improve performance without adding CPU power. Also, file caching in Linux will cache database storage files as well so whatever doesn't get used by PostgreSQL itself gets cached in memory.

So from a professional standpoint, I completely agree with you @xkm1948. More memory is almost always a good thing but, that's assuming everything you're working on isn't smaller than the memory you have, at least in my case. The best kind of [server] applications though, I believe, can scale to the amount of available memory in some capacity but, can work around having less. Clearly, on a workstation this dynamic changes a bit but, when it comes to serving, it's almost always the case.


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## Evo85 (Oct 17, 2016)

How much one needs to run a computer effectively is situational.

Common sense and some research will guide a person to how much they need.


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## Drone (Oct 17, 2016)




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## dj-electric (Oct 17, 2016)

The idea of this thread is funny to me.
RAM matter when you use it, course. I don't get why someone would get 8GB if he needs more, or 32GB of he needs less.
Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.


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## slozomby (Oct 18, 2016)

Dj-ElectriC said:


> The idea of this thread is funny to me.
> RAM matter when you use it, course. I don't get why someone would get 8GB if he needs more, or 32GB of he needs less.
> Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.



sometime relatives come over for visits?

most people don't know how much ram they need.  and without detailed logs I cant tell you how much ram you need. I can guestimate. but saying I just use it for web browsing is misleading. do you have 1-5 tabs open in chrome or 20-30. that'll make a big difference in ram utilization.

I just use it for office. well are you editing 3 page docs or 300 page docs. are you linking inside the docs. do you have macros enabled........ heck outlook takes 3gb of ram cuz I have too many search folders.


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## Aquinus (Oct 18, 2016)

Dj-ElectriC said:


> Of course that having more is better, but what use do i have for a house with 4 rooms if i only going to use 2.


File caching and things like SuperFetch make the world a very responsive place in the desktop world. In the server world, when you're talking about accessing large numbers of files or working with databases, simply adding memory can improve performance by allowing more to be cached. For servers, your "house" is more like a warehouse. On the desktop, you're not used to using more than 16GB of memory but, at work I deal with data sets smaller than @xkm1948 but big enough to benefit from going from 15GB to 54GB. When you're working with things like historical data where you grab every change that occurs, being able to work with that completely in memory improves performance by leaps and bounds. It also helps things like native command queueing do its job by saturating I/O capability when data isn't available in system memory because you can grab more at once.

Just understand that when working with computers professionally, you can have much different requirements than playing a video game or working in an office. Working with large data sets is a very different animal and you can't compare them. Games don't use 54GB of memory, databases can and they will.


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## Prima.Vera (Oct 18, 2016)

I use 3D software such as CATIA/Solid Works/AEgis, etc that, for example, if you have a huge assembly, let's say an engine, it will eat all your RAM in an instant. My station has 2 Xeon CPUs with 128GB of RAM , and still slower than I would love too. My RAM goes all the way to 120GB sometimes, during parts manipulation or when rendering objects, so it all depends on your needs.


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## Solaris17 (Oct 18, 2016)

Ram usage is my top concern in my job. Those VMs get pretty pissed when you start running out. Hell even really small Windows shops with a WSUS server can easily see 80+% of its ram used because SQL eats ram like candy. 

Gaming wise? IDK my personal rig had 32GB in it, but I also worked from my amchine some nights. I cant say a strictly gaming computer needs over 16GB of ram right now.

Professionally is a totally different story. 

When you have more RAM than you need people tell you you arent being frugal, you are spending money where it isnt needed.

In the professional world if my production servers go into save state because of resource exhaustion than we lose thousands compared to the few hundred we would have spent on memory.

Sure a simulation crash sucks. it sucks even more if the data is part of a million dollar deal. 

Its all about perspective. in my mind both professionally and casually if you can afford it (and lets be real even DDR4 is ridiculously cheap) then buy it. one day you will need it and waiting for that $80 to pay for itself is alot easier than losing $$$$$$$$$$ because you didn't think ahead.


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## yoyo2004 (Oct 18, 2016)

I am running on 16 GB desktop system and I often run out of memory when running multi-softwares, browsers..etc. 

My future build will definitely have around 32GB of ram, hopefully with Zen if the price is right. I love to keep all softwares running + Game If I want to without the need to close some stuff xD.


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## cdawall (Oct 18, 2016)

yoyo2004 said:


> I am running on 16 GB desktop system and I often run out of memory when running multi-softwares, browsers..etc.
> 
> My future build will definitely have around 32GB of ram, hopefully with Zen if the price is right. I love to keep all softwares running + Game If I want to without the need to close some stuff xD.



What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.


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## alucasa (Oct 18, 2016)

Depends on people's needs really.

For me, RAM is not much of a concern. # of CPU core is however. 

For gamers (majority of ppl on TPU), GPU is top priority.

For general computing (web browsing & office word), I don't think people need more than 8gb RAM.


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## yoyo2004 (Oct 18, 2016)

cdawall said:


> What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.



One internet browser with many tabs is enough to make you run out of memory!

One Software like solid works, matlab, labview...etc  + two Internet browsers running = boom out of memory.
or running two browsers  + one game = boom close to be out of memory..etc.

My laptop feels unusable, cause it only has like 8gb


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## cdawall (Oct 18, 2016)

yoyo2004 said:


> One internet browser with many tabs is enough to make you run out of memory!
> 
> One Software like solid works, matlab, labview...etc  + two Internet browsers running = boom out of memory.
> or running two browsers  + one game = boom close to be out of memory..etc.
> ...



Right so nothing a standard consumer would use. 

I would also love to see how many tabs it would take to use 16GB. Even using the memory whore that is chrome that works out to more than 60.


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## ratirt (Oct 18, 2016)

cdawall said:


> Right so nothing a standard consumer would use.
> 
> I would also love to see how many tabs it would take to use 16GB. Even using the memory whore that is chrome that works out to more than 60.


Yeah. 16 GiB and all used for browsing? I would love to see that. Maybe i'll make a test at home and see how many tabs I would need to open in the browser to eat all the 16GiB of RAM. Rarely possible to accomplished.  Unless you wanna prove your point and open xxx tabs but who opens so many though?


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## slozomby (Oct 18, 2016)

ratirt said:


> Unless you wanna prove your point and open *xxx* tabs



yup porn popups out of control are the only time I've seen it.


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## Komshija (Oct 18, 2016)

For average non-demanding user 8GB of RAM is enough, 16GB is enough for pretty much everyone (including hardcore gamers), except for those who do lots of video and RAW image edits. 



slozomby said:


> yup porn popups out of control are the only time I've seen it.


Not just porn, music and software sites are also full of pop-ups.


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## GeneO (Oct 19, 2016)

xkm1948 said:


> Welp, mainly because i never thought it would crash my lab computer. I was expecting it to be extremely slow for a 8gb. But completely crash it really surprised me.




Sounds like your application has a bug.


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## slozomby (Oct 19, 2016)

GeneO said:


> Sounds like your application has a bug.


running out of both physical and virtual memory will cause a machine to crash.


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## cdawall (Oct 19, 2016)

ratirt said:


> Yeah. 16 GiB and all used for browsing? I would love to see that. Maybe i'll make a test at home and see how many tabs I would need to open in the browser to eat all the 16GiB of RAM. Rarely possible to accomplished.  Unless you wanna prove your point and open xxx tabs but who opens so many though?



I currently have FO4 open and still am nowhere near maxing out 16GB


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## eidairaman1 (Oct 19, 2016)

cdawall said:


> What software are we talking about? 16GB in a consumer system shouldn't ever run out unless you are just full of viruses.



Or page file is turned off...

My OS uses ~2GB the rest is for whatever programs running

For garbage sites and non garbage sites, warez etc use no script, avast, spyware blaster, malware bytes, super antispyware. Or just stop going to illicit sites period.




slozomby said:


> running out of both physical and virtual memory will cause a machine to crash.



Make it run excessively slow


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## xvi (Oct 19, 2016)

RejZoR said:


> Only time I realistically need 32GB of RAM is when I'm compressing data with 7zip using all 12 threads.


I told myself I needed lots of RAM for 7zip so I could compress things super nicely, but I almost never used it. Of course, those that do will need it, but even though I thought I was that person, it turns out I actually wasn't that person.


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

Another typical day of workload. This is without any background application running. Looks like I may have to look into 256/512GB RAM options in a year or two.


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## jboydgolfer (May 9, 2017)




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## EarthDog (May 9, 2017)

Cause using half my ram makes me want to upgrade? 

Congrats on your one-off use... neat to see when not on a server...though ive seen hundreds of gb used there.


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

EarthDog said:


> Cause using half my ram makes me want to upgrade?
> 
> Congrats on your one-off use... neat to see when not on a server...though ive seen hundreds of gb used there.



Nah this is before i start the background assembly pipeline, which usually takes another 40~50GB

This is just running the genome assembly. I tried running analysis program and assembly program together once. It crashed my system due to I naively disabled page file. Once the RAM usage surpass 120GB the system will not response anymore.


I leave the real heavy lifting to the HPC clusters though. Some plants genome assembly takes close to 600GB.


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## hckngrtfakt (May 9, 2017)

I've been doing professional video editing and post production alongside web design and HEAVY photoshop for nearly 3 years on a mac pro with 32gbs of ram, and I swear I have never come close to using EVEN half of that.
32gbs was simply a fall over, but in a real pro environment i've never seen a single person use more than that (and yes, i've seen 3d studios render CAD designs but they have specialized hardware which uses almost the same RAM as most pro plevel computers)


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

hckngrtfakt said:


> I've been doing professional video editing and post production alongside web design and HEAVY photoshop for nearly 3 years on a mac pro with 32gbs of ram, and I swear I have never come close to using EVEN half of that.
> 32gbs was simply a fall over, but in a real pro environment i've never seen a single person use more than that (and yes, i've seen 3d studios render CAD designs but they have specialized hardware which uses almost the same RAM as most pro plevel computers)




Large scale Bioinformatics are crazy on computation power. Don't you find it amazing we manage to package such colossal amount of data into almost all of our individual cells? Our cells and genes are the true super quantum computers.


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## hckngrtfakt (May 9, 2017)

xkm1948 said:


> Large scale Bioinformatics are crazy on computation power. Don't you find it amazing we manage to package such colossal amount of data into almost all of our individual cells? Our cells and genes are the true super quantum computers.


I find it incredibly interesting, and I mean no disrespect to you, your research, your field of study, and neither your environment. I am simply talking at a more general level, one in which most end users would not need such high amounts of ram.
I too have ran computational simulations (one of which involved thermal trajectories for specific types of materials under alien atmospheres for JPL) but even after doing so, the hardware was so task-specific, each cluster only had about 10tb of ram in total. (about 64gb per rack)


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

hckngrtfakt said:


> I find it incredibly interesting, and I mean no disrespect to you, your research, your field of study, and neither your environment. I am simply talking at a more general level, one in which most end users would not need such high amounts of ram.
> I too have ran computational simulations (one of which involved thermal trajectories for specific types of materials under alien atmospheres for JPL) but even after doing so, the hardware was so task-specific, each cluster only had about 10tb of ram in total. (about 64gb per rack)



wut disrespect? nah i don't give a rat ass about that all.

just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff.

and yeah typical cluster node only has around 64GB of RAM.


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## Komshija (May 9, 2017)

Surely it matters, but you have to include some common sense. I heard about some gamers (and personally know one) who have 32 GB or even 64 GB of RAM. For gaming, 32 GB RAM is overkill while 64 GB is beyond ridiculous.

Currently 8 GB RAM would be minimum for optimal performance, 16 GB is enough for pretty much everything - from hardcore gaming to some video and photo editing.

For professional video or photo editing, I would say 64 GB would be enough, 128 GB overkill and 256 GB beyond ridiculous. Unless you need to study nuclear fission, there's no need for 256 GB RAM. Heck, one of the most powerful corporations in my country has 512 GB RAM in their main server supercomputer.


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## Ebo (May 9, 2017)

OP what rock do you live under ?
You have 128GB's of ram, thats fine by me, but you will never get close to using it, in my mind..........so its just all about bragging rights ?, good luck with that.

If you had a system that could use 128GB of ram(which it can), it means close to nothing even under heavy video editing, because you're never going to use it all even at 4K, and if it does matter, 64 is more effective in the end, so you ends up with bragging rights again ?. Ram is emptied every time the machine is rebooted, so all your ram is empty? why even bother if you dont sit a professinal machine, and if you do, you're not going to settle with and old I7-5820K.


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## AhokZYashA (May 9, 2017)

512GB of RAM is quite the norm for SAP HANA database situations, 
heck even some of applications uses up to 1.5TB of RAM, 

for the sake of transactional database, but its for server environment.


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## Ebo (May 9, 2017)

AhokZYashA said:


> 512GB of RAM is quite the norm for SAP HANA database situations,
> heck even some of applications uses up to 1.5TB of RAM,
> 
> for the sake of transactional database, but its for server environment.



Sure, but look at his machine, its the same as mine, just exept the ram amount.


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## P4-630 (May 9, 2017)

xkm1948 said:


> Looks like I may have to look into 256/512GB RAM options in a year or two.



Time for a server I'd say.....


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## FireFox (May 9, 2017)

And i have always thought that i am the only one who likes to buy more Ram than need it


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## P4-630 (May 9, 2017)

Knoxx29 said:


> And i have always thought that i am the only one who likes to buy more Ram than need it



I'm still doing fine with 16GB for gaming then that is....


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## FireFox (May 9, 2017)

P4-630 said:


> I'm still doing fine with 16GB for gaming then that is....



I have 32GB and honestly i don't know why i bought that much.


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## P4-630 (May 9, 2017)

Knoxx29 said:


> I have 32GB and honestly i don't know why i bought that much.



Just means you don't need to upgrade the coming years.


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## FireFox (May 9, 2017)

P4-630 said:


> Just means you don't need to upgrade the coming years.



It depends, i am waiting for Intel and their new CPU series and the next Boards, this time i skip the Z270 serie.


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

Ebo said:


> OP what rock do you live under ?
> You have 128GB's of ram, thats fine by me, but you will never get close to using it, in my mind..........so its just all about bragging rights ?, good luck with that.
> 
> If you had a system that could use 128GB of ram(which it can), it means close to nothing even under heavy video editing, because you're never going to use it all even at 4K, and if it does matter, 64 is more effective in the end, so you ends up with bragging rights again ?. Ram is emptied every time the machine is rebooted, so all your ram is empty? why even bother if you dont sit a professinal machine, and if you do, you're not going to settle with and old I7-5820K.



Clearly someone was not reading carefully.


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## Papahyooie (May 9, 2017)

My wife has a tablet that has 1GB of ram under W10. It works great for web browsing, and even those silly little mobile games.


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## lyndonguitar (May 9, 2017)

I've been gaming in 8GB for years, and I upgraded to 16GB last year ~ nothing happened lol. but at least it feels good to have 16GB ram

I don't think I'll ever need 128GB ram though, price is way too much over what you gain for it. and I don't do server stuff

RAM size matters yeah. ALOT. but also CPU speed, GPU speed, HDD speed, etc.. all those matters alot. imagine gaming on 2Ghz pentium with 512MB ram. but for what you do, there's a 'recommended' spec until you get diminishing returns. For gaming and general use, that is 8-16GB.


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## EarthDog (May 9, 2017)

Its clear this is only for his uses and the thread title has sensationalized everyone elses need (or complete lack thereof)


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## hapkiman (May 9, 2017)

I have 32GB (4 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz, but only because my wife thought she would surprise me and buy a second 2 pack of 8GB sticks (the same ones that I had just bought when I made this build). 

So of course it's overkill but she was just being nice and what the hell.  Fill all slots right?


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## xkm1948 (May 9, 2017)

hapkiman said:


> I have 32GB (4 x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz, but only because my wife thought she would surprise me and buy a second 2 pack of 8GB sticks (the same ones that I had just bought when I made this build).
> 
> So of course it's overkill but she was just being nice and what the hell.  Fill all slots right?




Yep! Gotta fill them up!    

I remember buying RAM and SSD for my gf's laptop as presents. She was like WTH why are you wasting money on these things? I could totally use the money for new clothes/makeups/misc girl stuff.


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## Ahhzz (May 9, 2017)

Komshija said:


> Surely it matters, but you have to include some common sense. I heard about some gamers (and personally know one) who have 32 GB or even 64 GB of RAM. For gaming, 32 GB RAM is overkill while 64 GB is beyond ridiculous.



Now you know two   I run on 32, and frequently make a mess out of mine. I play BDO, which encourages all the time, AFK connection, which encourages my already latent tendency to not reboot the pc unless I have issues. I also tend to keep a couple dozen chrome windows open, reading articles, daily sales the Mrs. and I discuss, web comics, etc. When I'm not rebooting on a regular basis, it's nice to have that headroom of 32Gb. 

To highlight the OP's point, "_just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff._" He acknowledges that his needs are particular to his field, and would be better "served" in a server environment, but everyone here knows how much more service that would take from his wallet


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## Toothless (May 10, 2017)

Ahhzz said:


> Now you know two   I run on 32, and frequently make a mess out of mine. I play BDO, which encourages all the time, AFK connection, which encourages my already latent tendency to not reboot the pc unless I have issues. I also tend to keep a couple dozen chrome windows open, reading articles, daily sales the Mrs. and I discuss, web comics, etc. When I'm not rebooting on a regular basis, it's nice to have that headroom of 32Gb.
> 
> To highlight the OP's point, "_just trying to get some shit done on consumer grade stuff instead of shelling out several thousand for actual server grade stuff._" He acknowledges that his needs are particular to his field, and would be better "served" in a server environment, but everyone here knows how much more service that would take from his wallet


BDO is just another MMO with really bad coding, and everything you listed I could do on my laptop that has 8GB. But whenever you look all them ram slots it makes ye happy in ye happy places eh?


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## Aquinus (May 10, 2017)

If I'm gaming, 16GB is more than enough and has been for the over 5 years of using my current machine. If I'm writing a service that will run on a server that has a data set larger than the amount of available memory, I will find a way to use it if performance is a problem. More memory is never a bad thing because unlike CPU power, it's one of those things that you don't really notice the benefit from until you run out of it. I can completely understand @xkm1948 wanting more memory. I used to work on a PostgreSQL database that was large enough where 128GB was enough to cache the most commonly hit tables but, not the entire database.


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## xkm1948 (May 13, 2017)

OK folks I am running into PageFile corruption problems again. Need your help and input here.

I am testing out a new program for work. Problem for this thing is it "automatically" detects and utilize max amount of RAM given the available threads. I have already run this on a workstation with 64GB of RAM and a 6 core 12 threads old Xeon. It ran out of RAM within 5 minutes and went right into swapping file mode. Since the workstation only has some RAID10 HDD, the processing speed was reduced to crawling. 

Then I decided to try this out at home with my machine. same 6 core 12 threads configuration, except I am setting the PageFile on my HDD instead of SSD.  The page file is set to "Let Windows Manage Size". So I started the program. The RAM utilization was fine all the way until it went pass 105GB. That's the point my system lost response. The task manager still show some updates all the way until 122GB and then blue screen. The error is IRQL NOT LESS EQUAL pagefile.sys

I am wondering what might be the cause of this? Not enough page file space? RAM instability? Mechanical problem with the HDD that hosts the pagefile?  My system has been pretty stable so far, it has passed ASUS Realbench stress test for over 24hrs of looping. I am really scratching my head here.


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## OneMoar (May 13, 2017)

the drive might not have enough throughput to expand the page file fast enough or keep up with the random read/write requests under high load the larger the file the slower the random read 


likely are gonna need fast a SSD just to dedicate to the page file there is a server at work configured like that for this very reason


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## Aquinus (May 13, 2017)

SSDs use ECC to ensure the correctness of data, hard drives (iirc,) don't do this, they only do a basic CRC check to see if what came over the wire is okay. What you're encountering is likely corruption on the disk itself, probably by running it full tilt. As @OneMoar said, you'll probably want an SSD because it's faster and protects your data with ECC. RAID 0+1 can protect your data long term but, it's not doing ECC or integrity checks for every read.

This is actually also why ECC memory exists because it only takes flipping one bit to make everything go to hell.


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## xkm1948 (May 13, 2017)

Increasing RAM size or Registered RAM is impossible. I might just invest in another larger SSD. Thanks for the heads up guys!! Really appreciate it!


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## Aquinus (May 13, 2017)

xkm1948 said:


> Increasing RAM size or Registered RAM is impossible. I might just invest in another larger SSD. Thanks for the heads up guys!! Really appreciate it!


Well, ECC wouldn't solve the problem with data getting corrupted *after* it gets written to the disk. My point is that a SSD is likely to prevent these kinds of errors from cropping up. Anything with good 4k random benchmarks should do you good for a dedicated swap SSD. Your only other option would be to invest in more memory which you clearly can't do without replacing the entire platform. Going forward if you ever decide to replace your machine, you may want to invest in DP system just to support more memory, even if you don't necessarily use the second socket right off the bat.


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## OneMoar (May 13, 2017)

he also really should be using a server os
home variants of windows are not setup to handle very large pools of memory
or just use linux


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## xkm1948 (May 13, 2017)

OneMoar said:


> he also really should be using a server os
> home variants of windows are not setup to handle very large pools of memory
> or just use linux



Win10Pro has been fine so far but i will look into Win10 Enterprise. I do have mint installed on a separate hard drive though.

Hoping to get a M2 SSD now for boot drive so I can shift all of the data handling to the current Sata SSD.


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## Cvrk (May 13, 2017)

Naito said:


> It's about how you use it.


is this about a penis ?

I'm fine with 8. But i don't do anything with my computer.


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## Aquinus (May 13, 2017)

xkm1948 said:


> Hoping to get a M2 SSD now for boot drive so I can shift all of the data handling to the current Sata SSD.


You might get better performance by using the M.2 as the swap disk if your primary concern is performance after hitting swap space. If you're going to rely on swap space to do mission critical tasks, you should use the best hardware for the job. It's also likely that an M.2 SSD will have better 4k random performance than a 2.5" SATA drive. Just my two cents.


OneMoar said:


> home variants of windows are not setup to handle very large pools of memory


They don't handle pools larger than the maximum for the edition, otherwise Windows 10 can be optimized to act more like a server and less like a workstation but, you're on the hook to do it. I think with what @xkm1948 is doing, that Win 10 Pro is enough but, I agree. Linux might offer a little more flexibility when it comes to tuning the system for particular kinds of workloads such as the rate at which the kernel schedules tasks. These kinds of tasks benefit from fewer context switches.


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## Kissamies (May 17, 2017)

128GB? Hah, that's twice the size of my first SSD! 

For me, I'm just a typical gamer and so far 16GB has been enough for everything. I had 24GB (6x4GB) on my X58 motherboard, but that was just "because I can". But yeah. You can't never have too much anything in a PC.


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## EarthDog (May 18, 2017)

True, just less in your wallet for no real reason.


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## Boosnie (May 31, 2017)

xkm1948 said:


> Win10Pro has been fine so far but i will look into Win10 Enterprise. I do have mint installed on a separate hard drive though.
> 
> Hoping to get a M2 SSD now for boot drive so I can shift all of the data handling to the current Sata SSD.



Wouldn't it be better the contrary? Put sim data on faster m2 and leave the os on the slower drive?

BTW, being a (traditional) developer myself I find it interesting.
Can you provide some links about wich calculations are going under the hood, algos and the scope of the simulation?


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