RAM: Can we put it to bed?

I completely disagree with this.

I will agree that the majority of average users will never come close to maxing out 8Gb RAM but there is still a huge amount of people that like myself which may be running applications, Visual Studio, Photoshop, SQL Server and a couple of web browsers which all together can add up to quite a lot of memory.

The machine i'm on at the minute has 10Gb RAM and to be honest if im doing anything database intensive then 6Gb of that is gone straight away.

Yeah, I didn't take into account the users who run memory intensive applications. Then again, out of all the computer users out there, how many of them run things like SQL, Visual Studio, databases and a few hypervisors? It's really a small percentage.

And yes, I have 16GB which I can max out easily.
 
Yeah, I didn't take into account the users who run memory intensive applications. Then again, out of all the computer users out there, how many of them run things like SQL, Visual Studio, databases and a few hypervisors? It's really a small percentage.

And yes, I have 16GB which I can max out easily.

The only person who would be running these programs would be someone managing a website or server of some sort.
 
How do you know when your ram is maxed out?

I run a copy of my forum on WAMP on my 16gig system for development purposes. It has the CMS, Blog, and Forum using a MySQL database. On my laptop with 6 gigs it lags just a bit. But on the desk system with 16 gigs it runs very smoothly. And allows me to poke around other programs and the internet looking for add ons for the forum. When doing the backup the whole thing goes to poop for a couple of minutes.

That's one way to see when you max out. The other is to check the memory usage in windows. The big one is when it crashes. But that's unlikely with the swapper enabled.
 
"When doing the backup the whole thing goes to poop for a couple of minutes.

That's one way to see when you max out. The other is to check the memory usage in windows. The big one is when it crashes."


Okay, so stressing it until it squeals like a pig might be one way of testing to see if you had "maxed-out" your ram. Does that impaired performance necessarily point to the ram? Or could it just as well be some other limiting factor? Geeks want to know.
 
Lets go back to the title of this post:

RAM: Can we put it to bed?

The answer, quite simply, is no. There are just too many variables and too many different situations that there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. We can barely agree on a one-size-fits-most answer (6-8GB of RAM).

A bit longer answer says that if you want to know the amount of RAM to put into a comptuer you first have to decide what that computer is going to be doing and who will be using it and what software will be running on it.
 
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