Woes of Too Much RAM

12. October, 2011

Usually, you can’t have too much memory in your PC but there is one exception: When you have lots but not enough.

Example: I have Eclipse (1.5GB), Chrome (1.6GB), Firefox (1GB), VirtualBox (2GB) and a Maven (1.3GB) build running. Plus 20 console windows.

That’s roughly 8GB in total which is the amount of real RAM I have installed.

The problem arises when the real memory is exceeded. I do have 8GB of swap but do you have any idea how long it takes to swap out 1-2GB of RAM to a harddisk?

Ages.

When you have lots of RAM, you don’t think about starting something else which might need lots of memory like GIMP or a video editor or starting WebSphere. All of a sudden, your whole computer freezes and you think “WTF? Did it crash? What’s going on?”

A lot of RAM can be bad 🙂


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