Never not listen to your RAM
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I googled a certain HP RAM module (B4U37AA; because telling the customer if the RAM has ECC is too much for retailers), and this is what I got:
So Google thinks this RAM is a music album and even gave me links to music tracks for my convenience. Well, at least they got the album art right.
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@NeighborhoodButcher I always listen to my RAM.
It generally says "YOU DON'T HAVE NEARLY ENOUGH OF ME!"
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@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
It generally says "YOU DON'T HAVE NEARLY ENOUGH OF ME!"
That's more than the average hard drive capacity of the computers in my home...
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@Tsaukpaetra What year do you live in? DO YOU KNOW JOHN TITOR?
(Actually, the same is probably technically true of me, since I collect classic machines)
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@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
What year do you live in?
NFC, my clocks can never agree if it's 1970 or 1982 or a slew of other years.
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I've had hard drives that made noise, but if your RAM is making noises then you probably should listen.
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@Weng what the hell are you doing that you need that much RAM?
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@ben_lubar Running Discourse?
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@RaceProUK that's more RAM than wtdwtf1 had disk space and RAM combined!
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@ben_lubar And it ran superbly.
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@loopback0 someone should make a benchmark for forum software where the data is larger than available memory and there are normal usage patterns going on at the same time as random accesses of old topics that haven't been touched for a while.
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@ben_lubar said in Never not listen to your RAM:
that much RAM?
I don't know, but I kinda wonder if I can get that much in my laptop for cheap.
Filed under: probably not
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@ben_lubar Well I don't know what @Weng is doing with 64 GB, but at work I have a class of machines all at 256 GB, several at 768, and for testing I have eight blades in a 4U chassis with 128 each which makes 1 TB of RAM in 4U. All for work, promise!
When I listen to it it usually tells me it's bored silly.
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@Lawrence said in Never not listen to your RAM:
All for work
Holding the rainbow table indexes, right?
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@Lawrence God I wish we could get our hands on that much shiny at WtfCorp.
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@ben_lubar Uh, well, today I used it to play Cities: Skylines and Xcom Long War.
At some point, I suppose I'll do developer-like things to it.
Seriously, though. If you're building your own machine, 64gb is peanuts ($258).
The following is the list of reasons why it wasn't 128gb instead:
- 32gb DDR4 sticks are unobtanium at $1100+ for a set of 4.
- It was unclear whether they would even work with this MB/CPU.
Very short list. 256gb would have been $3800.
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@Weng considering I've played XCom Enemy Unknown and Cities: Skylines, I'm not sure why you needed 64GB for it. XCom is 32-bit. Cities: Skylines is less than 5GB total. If you have more than 59GB of data representing a finite grid-based city, you're probably not playing Cities: Skylines.
So let's say you were playing both at the same time. What did you use the extra 57GB of RAM for?
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@ben_lubar said in Never not listen to your RAM:
extra 57GB of RAM
Cache. Eventually everything gets in there, and at that point he can unplug his hard drive and the system won't even blink.
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@Tsaukpaetra At one point, Cities, I swear to god, hung on a load screen (which was only there because I restarted the game) because the 'load from disk' had outraced the load screen.
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@Lawrence said in Never not listen to your RAM:
@ben_lubar Well I don't know what @Weng is doing with 64 GB, but at work I have a class of machines all at 256 GB, several at 768, and for testing I have eight blades in a 4U chassis with 128 each which makes 1 TB of RAM in 4U. All for work, promise!
If you're talking work servers, 512GB in a 2U server is low end for us, many of our servers have 64GB of video RAM. The room next to me has about a half petabyte of RAM.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Never not listen to your RAM:
@ben_lubar said in Never not listen to your RAM:
extra 57GB of RAM
Cache. Eventually everything gets in there, and at that point he can unplug his hard drive and the system won't even blink.
Has anyone ever tried putting their system page file on a RAM volume, I wonder?
I know it's a bad idea...
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@anotherusername Functionally no different than turning off swap.
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@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
God I wish we could get our hands on that much shiny at WtfCorp.
Well when you have a thousand VMs to run (on VMware), you're very happy if you only need to add RAM and not CPUs. Those are "my" 256-GB machines. 768 is more big databases.
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@Lawrence We're in the 5000 VMs territory and our blades individually run to a whopping 16gb of RAM and 6 cores (with a few 12 core/32gb blades for superheavy duty).
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@Weng We run AutoCAD on our VMs. Also, our users often have two 4K monitors, or three WQHD monitors.
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@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Seriously, though. If you're building your own machine, 64gb is peanuts ($258).
Right; but $158 of that is entirely wasted because unless you're doing something pretty unusual, Windows'll never actually need more than 16 GB.
So spend the $158 on like 8 copies of Rocket League and play with your friends instead.
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@anotherusername said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Has anyone ever tried putting their system page file on a RAM volume, I wonder?
Pretty much everybody did this for a year or two during the 90s when it made sense to.
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@blakeyrat why would it make sense to do that? That's like storing your refrigerator in an egg carton.
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@ben_lubar said in Never not listen to your RAM:
@blakeyrat why would it make sense to do that? That's like storing your refrigerator in an egg carton.
Because in Classic Mac...
(wait for groans to subside)
... turning on virtual memory caused the OS to use a totally different, and much more efficient, memory manager that gave you a ton of benefits even if you never actually exceeded the amount of physical RAM. Thus it was accepted practice to either put your swap on a ramdisk (which the OS had native support for, IIRC), or to make it as tiny as possible (which was your physical RAM + 1MB, IIRC).
There was a very small window of time between like version 7.0, when this made sense, and 8.0 where the virtual memory manager was just on all the time no matter what.
EDIT: actually now that I think about it, I might be mis-remembering. Oh well. In any case, the majority of people did the latter option. (Turning on virtual memory, but making the swap as tiny as possible.)
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@blakeyrat Actually, the eventual workload is "virtual machine sandbox". A whole Windows domain, plus Linuxy stuff will be living in there. Haven't bought the disk for that yet.
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@Weng And so in the meantime you're stuck with $160 in useless RAM and no copy of Rocket League.
Shrewd consumer.
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@blakeyrat said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Pretty much everybody
@blakeyrat said in Never not listen to your RAM:
in Classic Mac
Yeah, thanks for clarifying that...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Never not listen to your RAM:
NFC
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@Lawrence said in Never not listen to your RAM:
you have a thousand VMs to run
@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
We're in the 5000 VMs territory
@Fox said in Never not listen to your RAM:
When you enter my domain, things get pretty... weird. For example, right now I'm screwing around on an HP desktop that apparently doesn't support APIC correctly, so very little beyond Windows XP works on it (at least, without a
noapic
kernel flag or whatever).One of these days I'm going to see if Windows 98 can still connect to the internet... Probably a Tuesday.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Windows 98
@Tsaukpaetra said in Never not listen to your RAM:
internet
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@RaceProUK Should I mention this box has a (presumably working) modem?
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@anonymous234 Obviously, everything up to a few million dollars is peanuts, as the former chairman of Deutsche Bank has taught us all:
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@asdf said in Never not listen to your RAM:
everything up to a few million dollars is peanuts
Someone needs more expensive peanuts.
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@blakeyrat said in Never not listen to your RAM:
@Weng said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Seriously, though. If you're building your own machine, 64gb is peanuts ($258).
Right; but $158 of that is entirely wasted because unless you're doing something pretty unusual, Windows'll never actually need more than 16 GB.
I can go over that with just Chrome, or a photostitch, or several other things. I'm regularly over 16 GB on my personal machine, and get close to or over my machine's upper limit of 32 GB often enough to check how much is available before starting up something like a game.
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@Dreikin On Windows?
Photostitch I believe. Chrome, I believe possibly, if you use it like an asshole and just open like 574 tabs at all times instead of bookmarking shit like a normal person.
Most likely you're reading the "free" amount in Task Manager and not the "available" amount, and you're wrong about how much memory your computer's actually using.
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@blakeyrat said in Never not listen to your RAM:
@Dreikin On Windows?
Photostitch I believe. Chrome, I believe possibly, if you use it like an asshole and just open like 574 tabs at all times instead of bookmarking shit like a normal person.
Hey, I both keep tabs open and bookmark! But then, I never claimed to be a normal person, either.
Most likely you're reading the "free" amount in Task Manager and not the "available" amount, and you're wrong about how much memory your computer's actually using.
Nope. Available is about a third of all memory at the moment. Also, the paging involved when I go over is a pretty strong indicator it's not simply reading the wrong part of the output.
A bit more seriously, I had fun once when I tried to photostitch and HDR a huge image at the same time. Even with a huge amount of space allocated, it still failed to finish in anywhere close to a reasonable time (i.e., at all by the time I gave up). But I was intentionally pushing the limits there.
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@Dreikin said in Never not listen to your RAM:
bookmark
I really need to clean mine up. Some of those are 10 years old (give or take)...
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@Tsaukpaetra You and me both. I tried to do some organizing of them a couple weeks ago but didn't get very far before I got pulled into working on something else and forgot about it.
Hell, I bet my webcomics list alone I could probably trim 20-30 defunct links out of...
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I remember 8 bit computers did some barely audible noises that changes according to whatever it was processing. In some simples programs I could tell what part was running because of that.
Was it the memory? Maybe some vibration caused by it's magnetic fields?
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@fbmac said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Maybe some vibration caused by it's magnetic fields?
Pretty much. It's not just small 8-bit micros, your CPU and GPU do this. It's probably even more noticeable, given how much more power they can use. Some dudes even claim that you can recover RSA private keys from the noise of your CPU.
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@fbmac said in Never not listen to your RAM:
I remember 8 bit computers did some barely audible noises that changes according to whatever it was processing. In some simples programs I could tell what part was running because of that.
Look up the CPU frequency of those computers.
Look up the hearing frequencies of the human ear.
Yes, all those 8-bit components were operating in the human hearing range, so if not thoroughly shielded they'd produce audible output in, say, your TV speaker, or the speaker in your tape drive, or whatever happens to be nearby.
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@blakeyrat said in Never not listen to your RAM:
Look up the CPU frequency of those computers.
My MSX had 3.58MHz, but something was probably interacting at an audible frequency. Maybe it was the chip responsible for its graphics or something.