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That said - memory is dirt cheap

There are still practical limits, and sometimes you have to work within those. I've got a project on a 16G server - the data center doesn't have anything bigger. Moving everything to a custom server or different data center to get to 24G or 32G is... a lot of work. Some time spent finding memory reductions is still worth it.

And what if we went to 32G or 64G, but still needed more? "RAM is cheap" doesn't scale. The hardware needed to host a 128G system (or multiple 16/32G systems) isn't cheap.

Either you're wrong about the cost or we have a different definition of "cheap". The sweet spot for RAM pricing right now seems to be 16GB DIMMs, which cost $150 to $250. I can go to dell.com and configure a R320 with a Xeon CPU and 96GB of RAM for $2,500. That's less than a high-end Macbook Pro! A R420 with two Xeon CPUs and 192GB of RAM costs $4,300.

I recently upgraded two Dell Poweredge 2950s from 16 to 32GB of RAM. The cost per server was $300. If I'd needed to, I could have upgraded them to 64GB. That's on a five year old server that sells refurbished for $800.

Not really, on a desktop it is, on Amazon it's very expensive.

So don't use EC2 with your java apps.

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