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I agree that cloud compute is usually (too) expensive, but it is sometimes useful and cost-effective. Not long ago, I need to very quickly run a one-off analysis, which required over 200 GB of RAM. It was much cheaper and faster to spin up one VM on GCP for a day than having to order parts, etc.

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Similar - wanted to see how much ram gron would need for a particular file and needed much more than the 16GB or 32GB available at home. Quick and easy to spin up a 192GB EC2 to verify it needed ~95GB all told. No way I could have done that without something like AWS.

Depends... set the pagefile to something large, run the program. If it doesn't thrash too hard you can observe it to its largest growth. You'd probably want an SSD. Maybe that would work. Maybe.

What was the price?

No idea about GCP but a 32-CPU Digital Ocean droplet with 256GB of RAM costs $1,280/month, which is less than $43/day.

IIRC, about $120.

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