I scooped up 12 GB of RAM over the holiday season. In a happy coincidence, they were a match to the 6 GB I already had in there. I asked here if there would be any problems or reason not to try and ended up adding them. Memtest ran for over a day and a half without a problem, and I haven’t BSODed since.
Now what?
Nothing has really changed habits-wise. I have a thousand open tabs and never worry about the number of applications I have open, but that’s not really different than before. Task Manager is showing just 220 free and 12 GB available, which I’m taking to mean that applications have reserved about 6 GB to themselves—a higher number than possible with just the 6 GB.
The only thing I can think of is making a RAM disk, but the net seems to be all over the place on this. (Why is something that was routine in 1995 complicated in 2009?) Anything else? Any chance of taking over the world (I saw a cheap volcano for sale on Craig’s List).
I hate to disappoint you, but unless you’re running SQL Server on it, Windows 7 will probably never actually need that much RAM…
Well, I mean it’ll use it for the disk cache of course, but it’s a crapshoot whether adding a few gigs to your disk cache will actually speed performance or not. (My guess: not. Unless you have a very weird usage pattern.) Edit: I just saw you have a SSD. Definitely not.
Thanks. I miss the days when the pat answer is “more RAM is always better.” Then again, that means I miss the days of Win 95, doesn’t it? Oh well.
I kind of figured Windows wouldn’t behave much differently on its own. I have noticed some differences (e.g. per TM, Firefox is using over 1GB without any impact whereas it used to slow down in the 600-800 MB range), but was wondering if there was anything intentional I could do. Somehow get an entire program to load/operate in the extra space, use it for speeding up video encoding or something along those lines.
The question is whether you have memoy-intensive applications. SQL server is one. Anothe would be a graphics-intensive program like photoshop.
Another posibility would be to create virtual machines (using VMware Workstation, or MS Hyper-V) that allow you to have XP, W7 and / or Linux machine(s) running too, in case you have programs you want to play with on those.
Mostly because there’s no point these days with Windows Vista or Win7. MS put in a thing called superfetch so Windows will try to pre-load apps it thinks you will use from the hard drive into RAM. Then if you double click on an app and it’s already in memory Windows won’t bother to load it from the hard drive, it’ll just load the image from memory. (It’s my understanding Linux has this too btw.) So if you were planning on creating a RAM drive, copy useful programs to it and run them from the RAM drive Windows was doing this for you already.(Which btw is why free memory is so low but available is much higher.)
Another factor making the RAM disk less useful is the increasing size and prevalence of SSDs. The RAM disk will actually be faster, but the performance gain of an SSD over an HD is enough that the extra advantage of a RAM disk won’t be significant until you are doing something really I/O intensive.
Linux ends up caching apps because it has a file cache, and apps are files.
Windows 7’s cache is predictive-- if it notices that at 3:30 PM every day you start up Outlook, it’ll be sure to have everything needed for Outlook in the cache on time. It’s pretty slick. I don’t know of any Linux distributions that have anything like that.
Of course with 12 GB of RAM, that doesn’t really matter-- frankly 12 GB is probably enough to keep all your DLLs and EXEs resident in memory at all times unless, like I said above, you have very very odd usage patterns.
I built a new computer a couple weeks ago, and put in 8 GB (up from 6 on my previous computer.) So far, I haven’t found any combination of apps that fills up more than about 3.5 GB, max. That includes demanding games like World of Warcraft and Skyrim. We’ll see what the software landscape looks like when Windows 8 and new generations of software come out-- no need to regret that RAM purchase yet.
Make a RAM disk, throw your browser cache on there. That’ll keep Firefox from thrashing your SSD, save some write cycles. The downside is that your cache is gone when you reboot unless you setup something for that.
Run VMs. At all times, I have at least three VMs going: database server, web server, development sandboxes, etc. I run an Ampache server to share my music amongst the rest of my devices, keep my XBMC setups synced to a MySQL install, etc.