I have 64GB of ram. I use it to run my bank of virtual floppy drives.
Some of you just weren't born hardcore like I was.
:biggrin:
Well, I would gladly sacrifice my hardcore-ness and use that pool of memory for ZFS instead of floppy drives.
Seriously: I bet most of you guys actually have too few RAM in your systems. Many people argue that RAM is used by applications, and if your applications use maybe 4GB of memory - the rest is wasted.
However, in this area of virtual memory management, all operating systems use RAM as filecache. Due to applications RAM-requirements not growing as fast as RAM quantity, this leads to much RAM that can be used for other purposes like filecaching. With 32GB of RAM memory, all your frequently used applications, games and whatnot can be stored in RAM instead. Best of all: you don't need to do anything to make this work; it works on all modern computer systems.
You can test this yourself:
1) Open task manager and look for the performance tab for the three vital memory specs: used (by applications), cached (filecache) and free/unused/wasted memory. Unless you recently rebooted or your RAM pool is too small, your cached RAM should be about 80% of maximum RAM, with only 10-20% actually used by applications.
2) Try to start your browser the first time, look at the cached value which should grow whenever you read stuff from disk. Also notice that the second time you open your browser - or whatever application - it will open much faster than the first time. On very fast SSDs, the difference with RAM filecache is not that great anymore. But genernally your RAM is superior in latencies particularly.
3) Notice that the amount of Available memory in most cases is almost equal to Cached+Free memory. In other words: all the filecache is not actually memory-in-use, but instead can be freed whenever an application requires it. Generally most applications are 32-bit and thus are limited to 2GiB of RAM usage per process (3GiB with special compiler flags).