What would you do if you had 32GB RAM?

I remember not long ago showing my linux desktop on reddit and everybody was going crazy because I was still using Firefox and Chrome is the browser to use nowdays and all that crap, I guess times have changed for the better, and yes I still use firefox
- I started to use firefox back in 2007.
  I have never changed back. If someday there's a better alternative I'd switch. But sure thing that chromium based browsers are not an alternative.

I have 32gb of ram.
I literally only upgraded so I could install more mods in minecraft and cities skylines 1.

Chrome is such a pile of of shit.

Ditch Google trash. Go for alternatives. E.g., Firefox instead of Chrome.
- May as well chop the "s" off "alternatives"
- Firefox isn't going to solve the issue of overly bloated websites.
  
  It still has ManifestV2 and useful ad-blocking
  
  www.ublockorigin.com
  can help
- "Two Firefox tabs at the same time, man"
  
  That why I have 128gb of ram — productivity. I even can open tab with youtube and oom won't kill my family.
- Are you sure that Firefox is a good alternative, given all the things they've been doing lately? And why not fork, by the way?
  Also, Google is funding Mozilla, so... yeah.
  
  Because it's still better than Chrome? They still support ManifestV2 which is necessary for AdBlockers like uBlock to work properly
  
  Every other browser uses chrome and just puts their stuff on top. So you either use actual Google chrome, a rebrand (I know it's not exactly that nor that simple), or you use Firefox.
  
  theres always librewolf
- Hence the joke 🤣

took me a few days but I fully switched to firefox. my computer finally runs the way it should.
- I was really hesitant to switch to Firefox. It took a long time for me to finally leave the Mozilla suite and accept that Firefox was the one going forward.
- It gets even better when you add:
  Tab Stash
  And
  Auto Tab Discard
  Tab Stash lets me stash a big ridiculous research or shopping session I'd want to return to, under a nice collection label for later.
  And Auto Tab Discard will essentially unload open tabs you haven't touched in a while, so they'll load from scratch when you "wake them up", but they're not hogging all your RAM. It's fantastic.
- Ecosia is another option but it is also Chromium based
  
  Yeah we should stop using Chromium based browsers, because they favour Google indirectly.
- My washing machine uses Firefox as well
  
  i'm an angry non orgasmic bottom

I “cheaped out” with 32 and regretted it, working with huge files in RAM.
- I've recently really gotten into 3d printing, and I've bought the bullet and purchased a pretty nice 3D scanner (Crealty Raptor Pro).
  There's no such thing as ~~too much~~ enough RAM for these scans.
- getting into 3d art is a regret lowkey, I was fine with my specs before they felt op even
  I was into vr too, I was like damn this laptops a beast now im constantly struggling
- 128 here and I capped it the other day doing an in-memory parsing, lol
  
  16 here, because 🍎

My mid-range gaming PC from 2019 had 16gb, and I was looking at some new pre-builts and saw many still only have 16. Is there just not much need for more, or what? It's cheap - I might double what I've got in DDR4 for $50.
- If you're doing a new PC then I'd aim for 32GB.
  16GB is enough, yes, but for how much longer? It's been the norm for awhile now, which means that soon it won't be enough.
  
  sort of what I was thinking. I only hit the limit when I have way too many tabs open while playing an intensive game, but it's a cheap upgrade that might keep me in this PC for a few more years.
  
  I would say, that 16gb is barely enough, if you planning gaming. UE5 games can easily fill up that, so if you wanna have game recording or browser in background, then above 16 is mandatory. Maybe at least 24gb.
- I have 32gb and I always suggest others to get that much as a baseline theses days. I rarely ever use anywhere close to the full 32gb, but I am often times at or near 16gb in use. The main benefit of having 32gb is in my case I'll basically never be hitting the pagefile, but if you only had 16gb you'll probably rarely max out on ram usage, but you'll probably be hitting the pagefile more often.
  With the proliferation of fast SSDs and NVME drives hitting the pagefile is considerably less impactful than it use to be with spinning disks, but it's still slower than RAM.
- For gaming it is unlikely you will need more than 16, at least not any time soon.
  
  Depends on the game and what you’re doing with it. Cities: Skylines with a bunch of mods really struggles without a load of RAM. Playing Vintage Story recently, I installed a bunch of mods. Had to uninstall about half to come in under 32GB utilization.
  
  Mahalo, friend.
- I upgraded from 16 to 64 a few months ago, and kinda regret not going for 96 instead. Hoping these 64 last around a decade like the 16GB did previously
- 16GB is perfectly enough currently and I expect it to stay so for the next 5+ years.
  
  I would say 16 GB is the bare minimum. Oblivion for example needs about 10 GB, If you have discord, your Browser, and 1-2 other programs running in the background simultaneously, you will easily reach your limit.
  
  With 16 GB ram I can perfectly virtualize W11 giving 8 GB ram to the guest (on a Linux host), so yes, for normal use 16 GB is perfectly fine.
  
  Not really. 16 gigs is like the base amount of VRAM on the new 5xxx series nvidia GPU's, and you probably want more RAM than VRAM in your rig...
  
  Cool, danke.
  
  False.
  16gb is maybe enough for a phone these days.
  32gb is the bare minimum baseline, and if you want to game AND use a browser you should be seriously moving to 64gb
  And if you're a power user of ANY kind, go straight to 128.
  The only people who need 128 or more do not need to ask.
  So, if you only browse the web with a few other programs, and you have less than 20 tabs in a browser, 32gb.
  If you go over 20 tabs and want to game at the same time, just go to 64gb.

Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had 32G of RAM I could hook that up, cause apps dig a dude with memory.
Well, not all apps.
Well the kind of apps that'd let me watch two chicks at the same time do.
Good point.

Upgrade to 64GB cause 32 is not enough for my adhd
- Then upgrade from 64gb to 128gb because it’s still not enough for my adhd
  
  I've actually been considering using 128gb recently. I'm only considering this as I'm thinking about turning a server of mine into my primary desktop and it has 128gb in it already because I was using a RAM disk to generate large files in memory. I'm now done with that project and it feels silly having this powerful PC sitting here doing nothing.

I have 32GB and for most of what I do, which is normal desktop stuff and gaming, and occasionally messing with VMs, it's fine if not overkill.
- I once had a machine with 4mb of ram. Was fine for Word 5.5 and Windows 3.1. Needed a boot disk to run Doom. Upgraded to 8mb and it was fine, if not overkill.
  Son, have you tried just pulling your computer up by its boot straps and telling it that it only needs 8mb of ram because that was fine 35 years ago? /s

Linux and FreeBSD systems? Happy and snappy.
Work Windows system filled with crap corp security software? Open electron apps and wait for them to load.
Personal Windows system? Master of Orion, the remake.
- I do wonder how many people only hate windows because their IT installed crapware that takes half the CPU scanning every file move.
  I watched a fascinating rust video where this guy was talking about all of the things different OSs do differently just in the rust up install process. And how one of them (I assume windows but don't recall) was way worse but it was fixed by changing how they did IO. I don't work at that lower level so it's not a thing for me, but it was interesting. (I tried to find but failed)
  
  The file system Windows uses (NTFS) has a lot of neat features, but ends up being astronomically slow in unexpected ways for some file operations as a result.
- what do you need 32gb for in a linux box?
  
  Chrome. Or Firefox. They don't use less ram on Linux. I can easily get Firefox to 10G.
  
  Gaming, 3D Modelling, Drawing, ...
  
  ZFS and disk cache.
  I love it for disk cache as I can then get slow drives. After the prefetch during boot (once every few months), things are just smooth.
  
  either using it to serve a small network or the old video games

compile my own custom android

Play some horribly unoptimized games, like the Oblivion Remaster that recommends having 32gb. Which is fucking insane.
- Yeah, they defo need to work on optimization. It's an unreasonably heavy game both on cpu and gpu, runs worse than cyberpunk rt overdrive while looking worse...
- Oblivion needs about stable 10GB with max settings on my System.
  
  I wonder if they recommend 32 because 16gb is the minimum for maxed settings vanilla but they know everyone will have 2000 mods installed eventually and they are accounting for that. 🤔
  
  The remake?

I'd be in trouble, since between ZFS and my various VMs, my system idles at ~170 GB RAM used. With only 32 I'd have to shut basically everything down.
My previous system had 64 GB, and while it wasn't great, I got by. Then one of the motherboard slots died and dropped me to 48 GB, which seriously hurt. That's when I decided to rebuild and went to 256.
- Oh yay, lemmy is finally popular enough to have a nobody asked e-peen guy!
- NERD!
  seriously, nice rig phat stats
- Real question. Doesn't the computer actually slow down when you have that much memory? Doesn't the CPU need to seek into a bigger vast vs a smaller memory set?
  Or is this an old school way of thinking?
  
  No that's not how it works. Handling a larger address space (e.g., 32-bit vs 64-bit) maybe could affect speed between same sized modules on a very old CPU but I'm not sure that's even the case by any noticeable margin.
  The RA in RAM stands for random access; there is no seeking necessary.
  Technically at a very low level size probably affects speed, but not to any degree you'd notice. RAM speed is actually positively correlated with size, but that's more because newer memory modules are both generally both bigger and faster.
  
  That’s a complicated question. Bigger memory can split it between more banks, which can mean more precharge penalties if the memory you need to access is spread out between them.
  But big memory systems generally use workstation or server processors, which means more memory channels, which means the system can access multiple regions of memory simultaneously. Mini-PCs and laptops generally only have one memory controller, higher end laptops and desktops usually have two, workstations often have 4, and big servers can have 8+. That’s huge for parallel workflows and virtualization.

Not even use 8GB of it.

I went with 64GB on my most recent build... partially because it will eventually be retired to be a server, partially because last time i did a new build with brand new RAM, RAM prices skyrocketed (tsunami hit Taiwan IIRC, but still) immediately afterwards

Well, I don't think I need that much RAM, but it's a funny joke, modern browsers consume an insane amount of RAM.
- not gemini(protocol) .
  not lynx .
  
  I've heard of Lynx, but it's all very strange to me. Can Lynx play videos, view images, etc?
- not all of them, but def most. in my experience Firefox, tor, and librewolf have been pretty good in that regard
  
  Well, all three are essentially the same, with minor changes in terms of RAM usage due to specific settings/changes in these browsers.
  
  That’s the same engine for all three (FF) so should get fairly similar results

Run our of RAM, apparently.
A few containers, a bunch of IDE windows with large work spqces and a dozen or two browser tabs add up. At least I can follow my "workflow" of doing three things at more or less the same as time

Why is that in my personal laptop chrome works like shit and in my work laptop it works wonders?! The only difference between them is that in y professional laptop we have thousands of different security apps. It's almost like chrome is shit because it invades u your computer like a virus lol

I'd be wondering where the hell my other 64GB went!

Is it Chrome or is it the web page
- Maybe it’s Maybelline

I'm gonna download more RAM right meow! https://downloadmoreram.com/

Buy 32 more and lollygag on actually installing it, if my recent actions have proven anything.
- can't be turnin off the computer all willynillly now so that checks out 👍

Cry that one of my RAM sticks failed.

I have only 16 gb of RAM but I can open 20 tabs on Firefox!

32GB of RAM with zram configured aggressively and I still get close at times to running out of ram. 2 more years and I'll probably need to upgrade to 128GB
- Remember that free RAM is wasted RAM that you already paid for. As a result, modern browsers will behave differently in a RAM-rich vs. RAM-lean environment. If there’s wasted space lying around the browser will just hold on to everything on the off chance that it’s needed again, but will more aggressively purge things if you start running out of RAM.
  Keep in mind that when I say “the browser” I also mean Spotify and Discord because those are Electron apps which means they are actually just Chrome tabs in a trench coat.
  
  Yeah and I actually say that to people all the time. But you know it's bad when battlebit is using 12GB of ram. That game itself is only 2GB.
  And it's not just games and electron apps. Every peice of software now-a-days is so huge
  
  That's the same with Linux. It will always use the unused RAM for Disk Caching
  https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
  
  That's a very correct comment, which actually means more memory does not always solve everything
- Why do you need so much RAM, for browsing, gaming, or is it your operating system that uses so much?
  
  Browsing and gaming. Discord and Spotify are always open and I've noticed almost every update they use another 30-40MB. Not much but discord literally went from using 150ish MB to 400-500MB on first start up. After a couple hours of being open it'll use up to 2GB of RAM. Software is getting worse and worse with memory management and games are getting ridiculous too
- Always wonder. I bet he got to double lots of women just from that quote alone.

I'd read Lemmy posts about what I'd do if I had 32GM of RAM.

I just got some parts in the mail today so I can run four tabs!
- :O Good God man what will you do with all those tabs!
  
  Open Lemmy in 3 of them and have YouTube play a 10 hour cat video on the 4th as God intended of course!

Such a big fan of Google ???😳😳😳😳😳

I had a desktop with 16GB, never really went over 10, got a new laptop, runing win 11, 32 GB of ram thought it was way overkill, out of the box its running12-20GB, its crazy.
- As you start getting closer to your memory limit windows starts unloading things. 11 on first startup will use like 4+ gigs, but only really needs about 2. I honestly have no idea what it's doing with all that extra ram.
  Disk caching isn't counted in the ram used number task manager gives you so it's not like that's what it's being used for.
  
  It's sending personal info to Microsoft for marketing purposes

Tbh I can already do that with 8gb
- Yeah but try 3 mfer
  
  My first "system" was an iPod Touch 4th gen with 256MB of RAM. I wish that piece of shit could run Linux. Fucking e-waste as it sits.

I see I'm not the only person who decided to rewatch it after that thread

Do you watch EmpLemon too?

Is this a problem in Chrome? I use Firefox with just 16gb and have no problem with a couple dozen tabs.
- I have firefox and like 3 windows each with 1000+ tabs.
  
  Why?
  Could you not just bookmark them
  
  really? 1k tabs? genuinely curious as I'm a 0-tabber... whatre your browsing habits ? do you have them organized? you have to have some kinda tab organizer yeah? can i see a screenshot?
- Firefox suspends tabs to disk
- It's an exaggeration. Browsers use a lot more RAM than one would expect, but there's not that much of a difference between each one.

proof that money is evil
- ?????????

I bought two double rank 16gb sticks so I had the option of 64gb later, but with zero page file I have not had a single issue. I also horde tabs when online shopping, but I use extensions to prevent them from loading until selected. Still, never even been over 25gb in daily use and gaming. I also have a 3090 though so that 24gb vram soaks up a lot.