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How much RAM do we need?

J

JOSHSKORN

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
262
This isn't really much of a support question as it is a discussion. I'm curious as to how much RAM everyone has, how much is actually consumed and how much is wasted. Also, what your computer is mainly used for.

I recently upgraded my computer from 2 GB - 4 GB and have 2 slots left. I'm contemplating upgrading to 8 GB but I'd like to see others' input to see if it's even worth it. I do mainly gaming and multi-tasking. I may have 12-15 applications running at one time, one of those being Google Chrome with about 10-12 tabs. I do a lot of instant messaging and and have a lot of different applications for that. I prefer this over something like Trillian or Meebo. Sometimes I'll host a game server from time to time. All in all, the MOST stress I've put on my RAM is I've hit the 3.8 GB mark but mainly it jumps between 2.7-3.3 GB of RAM in use. This is coming from the Resource Monitor built into Windows 7. I also am running Oracle 11g and program using Visual Studio 2010 on my computer. The Oracle database automatically seems to load when I turn on my computer, and its process consumes anywhere from 500k-1.1MB of RAM at any given time. I don't do any video editing. Occasionally I'm on Skype.

Again, I'd like to know how much RAM you have, how much your system actually uses out of it and what you do on your system to utilize that much RAM.
 
I haven't come to a point where I'd need to ad more ram yet, been using 4gb for a long time. I do mainly the same stuff as you, bunch of browser tabs/gaming.
 
^^Agreed. For gaming/multimedia and web browsing, you don't need more than 4GB. I've never ran into a problem where I needed more RAM.
 
JOSHSKORN, in your case, seems like 4GB is about right. 8GB would only add more file cache.

At work, I have 4GB on Win7. I use one or two virtual machines running 512M each, a 1GB ram disk (used a lot because hd is slow), and have visual studio and multiple browser tabs open. I frequently hit over 4GB of commit size. Therefore, I could really use a 6GB system.

At home, I probably don't use more than 4GB, but the extra cache is nice for DVD burning. I couldn't find any use for more than 8GB.

So, a new machine with plenty of money to spend should get 8GB, IMHO. A light gamer/web browser with not much else probably only needs ~2 GB.
 
I agree with the above posters and say that 4GB is gonna be fine for your needs.

For me the rule of thumb for considering a memory upgrade is simple. You will know that you will need more because it will be obvious that you do because of slowdowns. Until then enjoy what you have. :)
 
djstarfox said:
JOSHSKORN, in your case, seems like 4GB is about right.
So, a new machine with plenty of money to spend should get 8GB, IMHO. A light gamer/web browser with not much else probably only needs ~2 GB.
Click to expand...

I actually had 2 GB for about 3 years and it worked just OK, I had to keep shutting down tasks I wasn't doing to do gaming, which I'm a bit lazy about. I've only once hit as high as using 3.8GB of RAM since upgrading and usually my upper range is about 3.2 GB of RAM. Mainly, I'm now utilizing 2.5-2.9 GB of RAM. I'm pretty sure that if I didn't have Oracle 11g installed on my computer with the services set to automatically start up when my computer starts, that I could probably still get by with 2 GB of RAM. Right now, the Oracle.exe process is using 530MB of RAM. Overall, I'm glad I did upgrade. Also, Windows Media Center seems to be responding much better, too.

I think I'll wait until my next major computer upgrade to try anything over the 4 GB RAM mark, which won't be until after Windows 8 is released. I just may need it, then. I've got my eyes on the Sandy Bridge chip, too, which for me will mean a new mobo and also memory and video card, even though Sandy Bridge supposedly has an integrated CPU and GPU, but at this point the GPU part of it most likely won't be strong enough for gaming, or at least I highly doubt it.
 
I rarely use over 3GB; at the moment I'm using about 1.8GB, with Opera, Thunderbird, Pidgin, iTunes, Evernote, etc. At this point I'm kind of running out of reasonable things to have open; any more and the clutter on my taskbar just becomes too much.
 
Currently using 4.39 GB out of 8. I don't think I've ever gone over 6, but knowing I have the extra headroom is nice.
 
People who mostly game can get by with 3 gb of ram. Content Creation id say 4, but that depends on how many apps you have open and how many things running inside of those apps. If youre just futzing around in one file with photoshop you really dont need much, unless youre that guy creating an image from scratch, in photoshop and illustrator, by hand, with a couple thousand layers...
 
I have 12 in my system and I'm glad I have it. I run an Ubuntu VM with 6 GB that I do a fair bit of coding in. This machine typically has 20-50 browser tabs and a few editors open. My preferred language is Scala, for which Eclipse takes ~2GB to run smoothly. Running an Android emulator is also resource intensive, and actually running simulation test code takes another pile of memory. In Windows I tend to run a lot of programs at once, do bluray transcoding, and game. I also fiddle with addtional VMs. I might be able to make do with 6 GB, but the fact that I have to qualify that with a might makes me happy that I've got the 12GB. For my uses it was a good investment.
 
exploding5heep said:
I have 12 in my system and I'm glad I have it. I run an Ubuntu VM with 6 GB that I do a fair bit of coding in. This machine typically has 20-50 browser tabs and a few editors open. My preferred language is Scala, for which Eclipse takes ~2GB to run smoothly. Running an Android emulator is also resource intensive, and actually running simulation test code takes another pile of memory. In Windows I tend to run a lot of programs at once, do bluray transcoding, and game. I also fiddle with addtional VMs. I might be able to make do with 6 GB, but the fact that I have to qualify that with a might makes me happy that I've got the 12GB. For my uses it was a good investment.
Click to expand...

Interesting. So what's your RAM usage? Are you pushing 6 GB, considering you said you think you could get by with that or what?
 
I remember one time while I was messing with SC2's Galaxy editor, the editor program itself used up around 2GB of RAM. Then playing the actual game and testing the map messed around with in the editor took up another 2GB of RAM or so. So yeah, I was and am glad to have 6GB of RAM available.

When I'm not playing or modifying games like SC2, I tend to have a Ubuntu and XP VM open with 640MB of RAM allocated to each, 4 x Firefox windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 3 x Chrome windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 6-9 PDF files opens, and Pidgin running. Usually hit around 4.5GB to 5GB of RAM usage with all that IIRC. Maybe I might be playing Fallout 3 in a window when I hit that 5GB of RAM usage.
 
Danny Bui said:
I remember one time while I was messing with SC2's Galaxy editor, the editor program itself used up around 2GB of RAM. Then playing the actual game and testing the map messed around with in the editor took up another 2GB of RAM or so. So yeah, I was and am glad to have 6GB of RAM available.

When I'm not playing or modifying games like SC2, I tend to have a Ubuntu and XP VM open with 640MB of RAM allocated to each, 4 x Firefox windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 3 x Chrome windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 6-9 PDF files opens, and Pidgin running. Usually hit around 4.5GB to 5GB of RAM usage with all that IIRC. Maybe I might be playing Fallout 3 in a window when I hit that 5GB of RAM usage.
Click to expand...

....I gotta ask, what's the need for so many web pages open in various VM's...?

Edit: Contribution, at least. I've had 4gb for the longest time, since DDR2 hit. Not having any memory problems but threw 2gb I had laying around in there to make 6gb total, figured it would be worth it since I plan to keep this setup for at least another year. Only down side is a slight memory bandwidth hit.
 
raveux said:
....I gotta ask, what's the need for so many web pages open in various VM's...?
Click to expand...
Oh no, none of those web pages are open in those VMs. The XP VM is where I test various AV and anti-malware programs and the Linux Mint (not Ubuntu, my mistake) is used just for fun. Thoe web pages/browsers are open in Windows 7, the host OS.
 
Danny Bui said:
I remember one time while I was messing with SC2's Galaxy editor, the editor program itself used up around 2GB of RAM. Then playing the actual game and testing the map messed around with in the editor took up another 2GB of RAM or so. So yeah, I was and am glad to have 6GB of RAM available.

When I'm not playing or modifying games like SC2, I tend to have a Ubuntu and XP VM open with 640MB of RAM allocated to each, 4 x Firefox windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 3 x Chrome windows w/ 9-10 tabs each, 6-9 PDF files opens, and Pidgin running. Usually hit around 4.5GB to 5GB of RAM usage with all that IIRC. Maybe I might be playing Fallout 3 in a window when I hit that 5GB of RAM usage.
Click to expand...

Yeah SC2 uses a ton, Mine uses like 2gb when I am playing. I usually use around 80 to 90% of my ram, I plan on adding more around Christmas because it is so cheap now, you can get good ram now for $60 for 4gb on sale.
 
I have 9Gb of RAM. I upgraded from 3Gb to 6Gb as 3Gb was getting used up easily when playing games. I bought the 6Gb version of the same make & model of the 3Gb, they worked fine with the overclock together so i use both, don't need 9Gb but i may as well.
 
My Notebook has 8gigs, I rarely see it go over 3gigs used with a bunch of stuff running.
 
With modern requirements exceeding 4GB, an enthusastic like me will always need minimum 8GB of RAM.

Heavy games like Crysis always occupy around 3GB or more of memory. So imagine you are playing a heavy game and an antivirus that is scheduled starts running on the background. That will definately affect the game in a 4GB rig.

My future rig will be a 32 NM quad core since 32 NM chips does'nt get heated up as today's quad (temprature reaches around mid 80 when overclocked to 4Ghz and above even with a good heat sink like TRUE 120).

It will have 8GB RAM which is good for gaming so that a process running in the background does'nt affect the gameplay

And I do development so I use Virtual PC for Visual Studio, SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint and other development etc.

Now putting 4 two GB modules in all the 4 slots is not a good option as using all the slots affects the OCing, so my question is when will 4GB memory chips become popular? So that I can use two 4GB memory modules to make it 8GB for my upcoming build ?
 
4G 32-bit single GPU card minimum.

4G 64-bit with multiple GPU cards minimum.
 
Have used up to 7gb out of 8 in certain programs.this is more the exception than the rule.
It seems that video conversion is the most demanding.
 
I have 8GB of RAM in my system. On normal days I'll use about 2-3GB, but anytime I use photoshop (which is almost 10-12 hours a day) I use most of the 8GBs I have.
 
DrDoU said:
Have used up to 7gb out of 8 in certain programs.this is more the exception than the rule.
It seems that video conversion is the most demanding.
Click to expand...

What video conversion apps do you use that require up to 7GB of your RAM to be in use?
 
Code: 
free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8127768    5156276    2971492          0     546152    3742688
-/+ buffers/cache:     867436    7260332
Swap:      6382584         64    6382520


ls /var/log/sysstat/sa[0-9][0-9]|xargs -n1 sar -r -f|grep Av
Average:      3857943   4269829     52.53    520043   2635976   3414984     23.53
Average:      3503813   4623959     56.89    521592   2966782   3465970     23.89
Average:      3775810   4351958     53.54    219535   3417826   1928029     13.29
Average:      3213396   4914372     60.46    470458   3643273   1969069     13.57
Average:      1319370   6808398     83.77    460149   5398292   2150414     14.82
Average:       478871   7648897     94.11    479045   6067668   2385170     16.44
Average:      1044882   7082886     87.14    522406   5543472   2299131     15.84
Average:      3534264   4593504     56.52    536976   3302584   1899943     13.09
Average:      3547780   4579988     56.35    537713   3305144   1865491     12.86
Average:      3252397   4875371     59.98    538646   3608662   1863304     12.84

I could obviously get by on less ;)
 
Most users need 4GB for windows 7 however they can get away with 2GB. For gamers I recommend 6 to 8GB depending on if you have 3 or 2 channels.
 
I planned to build my system with 6g originally but ended up with 12g b/c i got the 2nd kit for a reduced cost. I am a heavy gamer with some VM usage / programming. There is no doubt in my mind that 12 is overkill but i figured wth, I built my current system to last.
 
When I built my system around the begining of 09 I bought 8GB's of DDR2 for $90, I must of gotten the best time to purchase it because I've never really seen that price again! I mostly did it for futureproofing if need be.

Only times I ever make use of it is Video conversion and multiple instances of 7-zip! I'd rather have it than need it.
 
Does anyone run a gaming server or file server? How much RAM is used with a high load (many connected and playing or downloading/uploading files at once)?
 
i do a lot of transcoding movies and i have 4GB and it fills up. i might go to 8GB. from what i read Work (converting editing movies pictures) 8GB good idea, Gaming web browsing media content 4GB is more then enough.
 
6gig is the new 4 gig sweet spot.

I run 12 gig atm and at times in windows 7 64b, at times I still have 10 gig spare :|

Depending on what I do, it either gets used or it doesnt, but 95% of the time it doesnt get used and atleast 7-8gig is always left over just doing nada.
 
I've run 8 gigs since early 2008 when I upgraded from a 2gb opty x2 setup where I bumped the limit frequently and wanted to make sure that didn't happen anymore. I find it very useful because I *still* haven't upgraded to an SSD, so supercache utilizes anything free to keep me as smooth as possible.

I idle around 3gb used with 10-15 chrome tabs open and all the other apps I imagine most of us keep running. When gaming this can break into the 5-6 range.

...Of course I picked up the ram for around $50 per 4gb, so the investment has proven surprisingly wise given how much DDR2 increased after the 2008 low.
 
I run 6 gigs and everything on my system runs great. Gaming, folding, music, file transfer all at once and it barely goes above 3 gigs. I believe the only time i have seen my ram max out is when i was creating rainbow tables and when i bring up some cad work for school.
 
I have 4GB in Win XP so the effectively means I have about 3.25GB of RAM available to me.The only time I actually ran into memory issues was when I was putting together a spreadsheet.

I had formulas going from row 1 all the way down to row 65,536 and spanning 50 or 60 columns. Yeah, I ran outta memory.
 
JaguarSKX said:
I have 4GB in Win XP so the effectively means I have about 3.25GB of RAM available to me.The only time I actually ran into memory issues was when I was putting together a spreadsheet.

I had formulas going from row 1 all the way down to row 65,536 and spanning 50 or 60 columns. Yeah, I ran outta memory.
Click to expand...

haha I had to do a hard reset on one of the computers at work. about 7-8 years ago. I wrote a macro for Excel where I basically was able to input the number of times I pasted something from the clipboard in the cell below (I was bored) and needless to say, the computer at the time ran out of memory.

Anyway, this discussion I made was geared more toward Windows 7 users. I realize Windows XP and before uses a LOT less RAM, but for the most part, computers you purchase today will NOT have Windows XP anymore. I've seen computers advertised with insane amounts of RAM, but I've always questioned the reasoning for having so much. So, for the most part, having 4 GB is the minimal for smooth multi-tasking and for power users (Adobe CS, movie editing, etc.) it seems like 8 GB should do the trick, although I still haven't seen any screen shots from anyone utilizing over 4 GB of RAM at once, but apparently it's very possible. I've personally never hit my limit, but then again, I don't have Adobe CS5.
 
3GB is the standard minimum IMO for a modern Win7 computer. 4GB recommended
 
I used 4GB for Vista (RAM HOG) and Windows 7 and had plenty free while browsing, playing games, and using media tasks. I just upgraded to new hardware and have been using 6GB's Patriot Sector 7 RAM and think I will be good on memory for a long time.
 
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