Has the Time for 32GB of RAM Finally Come? | Hacker News Reader

Has the Time for 32GB of RAM Finally Come?

howtogeek.com

10 pointsrmason16 comments

No, the time for 32GB of RAM has not finally come. While AAA games at higher settings, machine learning, data science, and kernel development may require at least 16 GB, and preferably more, consumer devices have traditionally been on the lower end of the scale, with the majority of new devices currently being sold coming with 16GB or less of RAM.

Current budget laptops (<$300) still have 4GB of RAM. Most mid range laptops come with 8GB standard, with more memory optional. I would say 8GB is the current overall average among new devices, and with the many many older devices still being used, I'm guessing that of all the devices in America currently being used, the average is ~6GB of RAM.

8 GB is more than enough for the majority of people. Combined with the advent of modern SSDs which enable high-speed IO at unprecedented rates, and widespread use of swap, it is hard to think of a case where regular consumers (who make up the majority of the market) would need more than 8GB (or even 16GB, to be generous) in the next 10 years.

I would be very, very surprised if the random guy using just a browser, no matter how many tabs were open, found a way to exhaust 8GB of RAM, when combined with the speed and flexibility of modern SSD-based swap. Modern browsers are efficient with memory usage, and tabs that aren't in view can be offloaded to swap whence they can be quickly retrieved. Business/commercial users, who typically have Word/Excel/Edge/Teams/Chrome running at the same time, would benefit from 16GB of RAM but again, 8GB would be usable and anything more than 16GB would have marginal benefits, if any.

> 8 GB is more than enough for the majority of people.

I have 8 GB RAM (with no swap) and just using browser with few tabs and several times a week system get out of memory (due to Firefox eating most of it), ending with either system thrashing or kswapd running . If Linux memory management have worked correctly it would just kill firefox, but unfortunately it does not, so i have to kill it manually in mostly unusable system (due to thrashing). For a period of time, i ran Firefox in memory control group (restricting it to 4 GB), which helped that thrashing was limited to Firefox and not affected the rest of the OS. Several people around me reported the same problem (although less often).

> Combined with the advent of modern SSDs

I do not think it is a good idea to use swap on SSDs due to limited number of writes. A year ago i replaced perfectly working SSD just because SMART reported that average write count exceeded nominal lifespan and allegedly most SSDs fail between 100%-200% of lifespan (in average write cycles). And modern SSD have even lower number of write cycles (although higher capacity, so writes are better distributed).

True, OOM issues can occur when swap is disabled, but most consumers don't disable swap.

Regarding SSD lifespan, case-by-case analysis has shown that SSDs are both more reliable than HDDs, as well as capable of more TBW per lifespan. SSDs are better than HDDs in almost every way. With average SSD TBW capacity of between 60 and 150 terabytes written, and an average of 10GB written per day (which is on the high side), an SSD can be expected to last between 16 and 41 years, which is longer than the average usability lifespan on a computer.

Regarding your experience, I can't make an objective analysis however from the fact that you're running Linux and that you wrote to disk more than the nominal lifespan, I'm guessing that you probably were doing some IO-intensive things that normal consumers wouldn't do.

> Regarding your experience, I can't make an objective analysis however from the fact that you're running Linux and that you wrote to disk more than the nominal lifespan, I'm guessing that you probably were doing some IO-intensive things that normal consumers wouldn't do.

1. Low-end SSDs starts at 40 TBW

2. Overwrites are counted for internal writes, not OS-level writes. In my case SMART reported 2-3x higher number of internal writes than OS-level writes (probably due to strained wear-leveling algorithm when the SSD was used mostly full).

3. I would consider my case as low-intensity workload (basic desktop usage), but 10 GB/day seems like too low. Just watching a movie is 2 GB write, if one download it first instead of watching stream. But let say it is 10 GB/day.

40000/(10×2.5×365) = 4.38 years, I think my SSD was 6 years old.

But all this is irrelevant, as the original argument about swap on SSD is not about regular usage of SSD, it is about writes triggered by swapping, esp. thrashing during near-OOM situation.

>I would be very, very surprised if the random guy using just a browser, no matter how many tabs were open, found a way to exhaust 8GB of RAM

LOL, that hilarious! I am an unashamed tab hoarder using Firefox, and regularly go over 24Gb just for Firefox.

I find it will still run but won't scroll smoothly or switch between tabs instantly when I go over ~150 windows (each with at least 20-40 tabs).

Yes, I have a problem. No, I don't care.

I can search tabs by typing "% keyword" in the URL bar.

Why should I ever need to close something I'm not finished with?

The PC has 64Gb RAM though, because I often run VMs as well.

Where more RAM is available, computers will keep more in RAM. If you remove your RAM leaving 8GB behind, you will find that in cases of limited RAM availability, your browser will most likely offload the "hot" frequently-used-tabs to swap, and data from your other tabs will be discarded, with the page being reloaded when it is switched back to. The margin after which tabs are dropped, so to speak, varies and can differ on different systems.

As I think you have found out, regardless of your RAM, having a lot of tabs open probably won't end up being a smooth experience. However, I think you'd be surprised to find that given less RAM (~8-16GB) your system will probably perform similarly. While it may be necessary for you to have that many tabs open to complete your workflow, most consumers don't need that, and would be able to get by without having to resort to thousands of tabs.

Given a bigger budget, you made the choice to buy more RAM, which is great and I'm sure your system thanks you everyday for it. However, I don't believe that the majority of consumers need to make that investment, or wish to spend the extra money for RAM which they probably won't make full use of.

I've been using 16GB Macbooks and Linux PC's for many years and often have 500+ tabs open (going down rabbit holes is how I find new things.) I find todays OS's are not really fully debugged for situations like this. I run resource monitors and the RAM, swap, network I/O, disk I/O, GPU, temperature, CPU can all be in normal ranges and yet the computers will suddenly fail due to some hidden resource running out (max # of open files, max user processes, graphics handles, swap error). Browsers always have memory leaks if you use extensions. The OS's do not handle these things gracefully, often slowing down so much that just closing windows takes a very long time and can crash the system. 32GB would let me keep even more tabs open, but it seems likely the OS will not be happy about it without some tuning (which most people would not even have a clue about) but I think it should be the default. RAM has been used as a selling point, just like CPU speed used to be. It doesn't actually cost that much more, it is expensive because it is profitable. The typical amount of RAM in computers has not changed much in a long time. My paranoid suspicion is that part of the reason is that lots of RAM gives all those cores something to actually do, making consumer computers into something actually capable of doing heavy work, which in turn has national security implications. If anyone can run a finite element analysis or train an ML algorithm on a laptop, that gives the whole world a lot of new capability. Keeping the cost high limits what computers can do to only those who can afford it. Disk I/O seems similarly limited (why don't rotating drives use RAID internally across multiple platters to get very high throughput and reliability? 500GB to 1TB is really all the disk anyone needs, just like 10MB used to be?) Along the same lines consumers are discouraged from running servers, so half the usefulness of computers is wasted. But maybe it all really does come down to cost/profit. A multicore CPU that is run flat out, fully fed with data, for long periods of time may require much better cooling than most laptops have.

The market for RAM and NAND is very competitive, with costs rapidly declining over time. 32GB of DDR4 is just $70, and you can get slower 2TB NVMe drives for ~$120. These are a steal IMO.

RAM/SSD upgrades for pre-built computers are expensive, but that's to be expected. It's used for market segmentation.

If you want cost effective upgrades, buy the base model of an upgradable machine and upgrade it yourself. For a desktop you can even start from scratch.

You'll have to skip modern Macs, though.

> Playstation 5 Memory 16 GB GDDR6, 512 MB DDR4 RAM (for background tasks).

I am an AAA PC Gamer, but why are PC games requiring 16GB of System Memory minimum on top of 8 to 16GB of GPU Memory?

And the problem is, again as I have stated for nearly a decade. The Cost of memory per GB aren't dropping much.

It's dropping but way slower than it used to.

The memory requirements for pc are from my understanding due to PC often multi tasking next to the game, chrome, discord, mail client, music, twitch, the list goes on.

> I am an AAA PC Gamer, but why are PC games requiring 16GB of System Memory minimum on top of 8 to 16GB of GPU Memory?

I'm a console gamer but I think it's to do with things like textures and other game assets need to go to system RAM before GPU, so it's not quite as efficient as they unified RAM on consoles.

I think this was an issue with the PS3 vs Xbox 360. PS3 had 256MB of system and 256MB GPU, vs the 512MB unified in the 360. This resulted in memory heavy games like Skyrim running worse and having more bugs on the PS3 version

With Microsoft Direct Storage 1.1 games can stream data from SSD straight to the GPU bypassing the CPU. However games need to be written to support this feature and it will only work with DirectX 12 + Shader Model 6.0 games on Windows. So it won't work on the Steam Deck.

Yes. The main culprit is bloat and the demise of shared libraries. Application devs are getting lazy. Everybody just packages up their whole dependency tree and slaps on a virtual machine with their own memory management. This would be fine if you had only one app ever running, just like those devs on their high-end maxhine. But no. Soon as you have multiple browser, electron and java apps running, snaps, rust, nodejs, you name it, each is gobbling up memory like crazy, and eve 32 GB are exhausted in no time.

Been using 32GB since 2015. That and a fast SSD (I have a 550MB/s read/write Samsung SSD, never tried M2) ensure I virtually never have any perceived slow down or any wait times. Running virtual machines and containers is a very smooth experience.

Dropping down to half the RAM for my work laptop is a pretty bad experience. Regularly have to make sure I don’t have too many Chrome tabs open.

I've got used hardware with 32GB and a fast i7 processor that set me back about $100. I'm quite happy with it, as I am with my 8GB i5 based notebook. Once SSDs became affordable, PCs became fast enough for almost anything.

The only hardware I've wished for recently is an nVidia RTX 3060 so I can run stable diffusion faster, but I really don't need it.

Still older hardware is not recycled.

Has the time for a new Pollution Round Finally come?

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