New computer build stories
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my home tower has 32GB.... the singular reason i went that high, was so that i could create me a 24GB ramdisk and install a bunch of my games to that (particularly ones known for long load times), I anticipated this would be a win for me because i do not habitually install any games to my SSD and instead install them on my much larger HDD.
I now somewhat regret that decision, as the games that are small enough to fit in that ramdisk did not appreciably improve performance when in the ramdisk and the ones that are still real loading time bastards are too big to fit in that ram disk (i'd need at least 50-60GB of ramdisk to fit them in, and the motherboard i purchased will not support that much RAM)
Good news though is I'll be doing another gaming rig build for a friend soon and will sell him half my ram at cost - 10% to build it so we'll both have 16GB (i do run VMs too, so the 16GB gets used) and i'll only be out about 20$ on the ram that turned out to not give me any benefit.
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That reminds me of when Jeff wrote about how 2 cores was enough for anyone. Which opinion lasted until he got a machine with more.
That doesn't mean I can't be reminded of stuff that is similar.
<Yeah, I know he never said it. I just want to rankle blakey
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Regardless, my home tower has only 8gb of RAM, and I guarantee that they will never fill up completely, even while running VMs and gaming
It wasn't that long ago that people were saying the same thing about 4GB. And it wasn't that long before that when people were saying that it would be forever before 64-bit would even be necessary.
I just max them out when I build them. RAM is cheap and I never end up doing the upgrades that I think I will do later.
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but by the time
DDR5DDR-whatever has come out, he still wouldn't have needed anything more than AT MOST 16gb. Anything more than 8gb provides no performance benefit anywayIt wasn't that long ago that people were saying the same thing about 4GB
You could quite easily still play most modern games in a reasonable way with only 4gb ram. The only thing it affects is swapping performance, ie alt-tabbing speed
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Anything more than 8gb provides no performance benefit anyway
I bought one of Dell's high-end business laptops in 2001. It had a completely massive 512MiB RAM. At the time I was quite sure there was no way I was ever going to be able to use all of that.
Even so, the relentless march of software bloat used it all up about two years before the CPU became too slow.
I don't believe there's some magic amount of RAM that we can forever declare Enough.
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I don't believe there's some magic amount of
RAM<insert computer part with a speed/capacity> that we can forever declare Enough.FTFY
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he still wouldn't have needed anything more than AT MOST 16gb.
My workload is different than most, and I am not a gamer, but when I built my rig prior to this I built it with 4 cores and 16GB of RAM. It felt like I had a fucking Cray running in my office when I first fired it up. Time marches on, and it was not that long before I was hitting the limit.
You simply cannot say these things with any certainty. If you give game developers an amount of RAM that people are likely to have, they will use it.
But, all that being said, I agree with @blakeyrat. If you have to make a choice between 8GB of ram and a larger SSD or 16GB of RAM and an SSD that will likely be too small in the near future, I would choose 8GB and a bigger SSD. If you can swing it though, max it all out.
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True. But running out of RAM means you start swapping, which is a sudden orders-of-magnitude slowdown (maybe only one oom if you're swapping to SSD). Pretty much everything else degrades speed gradually and kind of linearly.
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I bought one of Dell's high-end business laptops in 2001
Things were moving quite a bit faster in 2001. The early 2000's were a period of relentless growth in software.
forever declare Enough
I never said forever, I mean roughly 3-5 years.If you give game developers an amount of RAM that people are likely to have, they will use it.
Game developers care more about on card VRAM, which is the main limit to things like texture size. If your code requires 16gb of ram, then you've done something wrong [in 2015-2020]
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I never said forever, I mean roughly 3-5 years.
Right, which is about one or two generations of RAM technology, which was my point. By the time you actually need more, the old stuff will be really expensive and you'd have been better off getting it when it was current.
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My point is that in 2-5 years, you won't NEED more RAM, and you will likely be ready for a more serious upgrade, which will require moving onto the new RAM technologies
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I don't believe there's some magic amount of RAM that we can forever declare Enough.
I think everyone's aware of that. OTOH there's a decent chance that you can declare a certain amount enough for a given machine.
2 years ago I built a 4GB i5. That was plenty of memory until I started getting into modded Minecraft, so this spring I bought another 4GB. While the machine has two more slots and can go to 16GB, and while I can think of at least three ways I could utilize 16GB, none of them are likely scenarios.
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Makes sense to do that early.
Nobody reads anything. I might as well just type lojban like Ben L does.
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I recommend writing math instead, at least then it will mean something
Zing
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If your code requires 16gb of ram, then you've done something wrong [in 2015-2020]
Or you're doing something more serious. Big CFD simulations will chew as much memory as you've got; people who do that sort of thing always want a finer lattice. In fact, that's the sort of thing that is usually done on a supercomputer, and those are these days little more than a reasonably fast cluster with a kick-ass interconnect and excellent refrigeration.
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This thread encouraged me to upgrade my SSD in my almost 4 year old machine. Going from 140 GB to 1 TB. Sqeee!
I already had 16 GB of RAM. Which means I will be good for a bit.
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FWIW, this machine has 6GB, and I'm at >80% used with little more than Chrome and Thunderbird running. Thunderbird is using ~150MB; Chrome is using the rest.
Filed under: Yes, I do have more than one tab open. Why do you ask?
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This thread encouraged me to upgrade my SSD in my almost 4 year old machine. Going from 140 GB to 1 TB. Sqeee!
I already had 16 GB of RAM. Which means I will be good for a bit.
We have another female around here? When did this happen?
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Ha ha! Long time reader from the old forums. Never signed up though.
I feel like I practically know most of you.I know how most of you have time to post as much as you do.
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I feel like I practically know most of you.
So...you're stalking us?
And most of us make time by neglecting our work. I am not entirely sure what @boomzilla gets a paycheck for anymore, with post counts as high as his.
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We have another person presenting as female around here?
FTFY. We don't know who zhe is IRL.When did this happen?
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FTFY. We don't know who zhe is IRL.
You have went on a date with a convincing transvestite before, and did not find out until the lights went out?
Just a guess...
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Um, no. However, gender expression is a recurring topic here, especially in regard to an anthropomorphic fox and hedgehog.
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Good save.
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I was kinda a Tomboy when I was a kid. And I've been told I have more balls that a lot of guys.
other than that..."normal" woman.I even had to ask my husband about the furries because that was new to me.
I think I am too left brain...don't have the energy to maintain a persona.
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Noooo.....stalking is such a harsh word. --putting away the notebook.
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If I were a sensitive special snowflake with the issue that now one commented on my technology.
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Stalking forums is most definitely fun!
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I was kinda a Tomboy when I was a kid. And I've been told I have more balls that a lot of guys.
Hey, me too! Welcome to the club :)
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I already had 16 GB of RAM. Which means
I will be good for a bitblakey thinks that I wasted my money.FTFY
If I were a sensitive special snowflake with the issue that now one commented on my technology.
There ya go. Solved that problem.
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my home tower has 32GB.... the singular reason i went that high, was so that i could create me a 24GB ramdisk and install a bunch of my games to that (particularly ones known for long load times), I anticipated this would be a win for me because i do not habitually install any games to my SSD and instead install them on my much larger HDD.
Out of curiosity, what happens when you power off? Have to install the games again? Or is there some backing storage and Windows just duplicates it into RAM on boot?
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i construct it manually each time i use it.
I could have it magic persist to disk and load on boot, the ASUS ROG software allows for that, but i never bothered to set it up, and frankly rarely bother to activate the RAM drive these days because i just don't get the performance boost from the games that fit in it and the games that would benefit from it don't fit in it.
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LOL Thank you! I did sort of expected Blakey to go all Blakey on me for that comment.
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What's funny is you bought a 6700K when many(!) 5th and 4th gen i7s can run circles around it.
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I did sort of expected Blakey to go all Blakey on me for that comment.
No worries, I'm sure he will sooner or later.
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i construct it manually each time i use it.
So, basically, you reimplemented this?
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/products-for-dumb-suckers/6815
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in that i got scammed? no. i got an honest to goddess ram drive out of the deal with the IO speeds to go with it.
In that i got exactly bupkis noticable gaming performance improvement? yep.
I used the ROG ram drive software that came with my motherboard, and benchmarks showed a massive IO perf improvement over my spinning rust that i install games to. I then wrote some extremely simple
.batfiles to copy games to the ram drive (one per game because i was too lazy to make them generic and the damn things are only like 5 lines anyway)
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I might have over-spec'd this server a little... it's three years old:
...naaaaaah. We had budget. And with 50+GB left over for disk cache, we don't really need any SSDs :-)
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that's a server. servers have different spec requirements than desktops.
64GB is actually a little on the light side for that server it seems as your CPU is practically idling. I assume you have at least 4 cores in there, which makes your load average of < .5 extremely low (with 4 cores your "maximum" steady load average shouldn't exceed 2 (or number of cores /2(but that is just my opinion)))
EDIT: the above statement is of course made based on assumptions about usage that could turn out to be entirely unfounded and baseless. Do not take this as advice for speccing out you own servers without doing the proper research yourself!
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which makes your load average of < .5 extremely low
That depends on what the peak load is. You can't just spec for the steady state, unfortunately.
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That depends on what the peak load is. You can't just spec for the steady state, unfortunately.
granted, granted (there's a reason why a 50% load was my maximum steady state number)
this could have been taken when all the VMs were idle.
Your correction is appreciated. and my statement above has been updated to reflect that
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I assume you have at least 4 cores in there
It's got a couple of six-core 2.93GHz X5670s, which makes either 12 or 24 cores depending on whether you count a hyperthreading core as 1 or 2.
I run four Windows VMs and a Linux VM on it. The only time it gets to flex its processing muscles much is when multiple users are using YouTube, because I'm proxying YouTube over HTTP to the workstations to make filtering work, and using
openssl s_clientinside the server to get the HTTPS connections YouTube wants. Highest load average I've ever seen on it is 10ish.I seem to recall that
openssl s_clientis rather inefficient because it's coded so as to blunt side-channel timing attacks. I don't give a rat's arse about the security of my YouTube HTTPS connections - I'd be much happier if Google was still offering those over HTTP - so if you know of anything that does the same job at less CPU cost I'm all ears.Edit: it was indeed mostly idling, because 11pm is well outside school working hours. The two VMs showing CPU activity in that
toplisting would have been running Clam virus scans.
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Those CPU counts actually do follow from the screenshot - you can see about 55% of a core is currently being used by adding up jobs, and that equates to 2% of total CPU capacity, which implies about 24 cores, counting possible hyperthreading cores as 2 cores.
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Blacks are generally 7200, right? There can be a noticeable difference in loading time between a 7200 HDD and a SSD.
I've got a pair of WD Blacks in RAID0 which games get installed to. There's a small noticeable difference between loading from those and loading from the SSDs, but it's not worth worrying about IMO. Certainly not enough to piss around moving games between the HDDs and SSDs or regularly installing and deleting games to fit onto the SSDs.
