this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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Discussion around the Framework mission of building products that last longer by making them upgradeable, customizable, and repairable. Consumer electronics can be better for you and for the environment.
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And what does one do with 128GB of RAM?
I'll just speak for myself.
It would be quite useful for the sort of software development I do, where I want to run my IDE, applications under development, plus various databases -- all in Kubernetes, Docker compose, etcetera, and ideally with realistic heap sizes.
It's also handy for running integration tests that use TestContainers in parallel so I can run a huge test suite very quickly with, for example, 10 copies of the application and database under test at the same time.
I often have to do backporting work meaning I want multiple large projects open in my IDE at the same time. I like to enable all of the indexing features which enables lots programmer assistance functionality, but it uses lots of RAM.
It would be a entirely a luxury but not wasted, enabling multiple of these kinds of workflows to happen at the same time.
The question is whether you would just become hopelessly CPU-bound before being able to make use of it. I suspect yes, in which case, something more modest likely makes sense.
To add another software development perspective onto this, both Linux and windows cache files in unused memory pages.
So even if you had 128GB of ram and were using “only” 32 of it, say, your OS could make (around, actual number is slightly less due to various OS-nerdy things) 96GB worth of files accessible at RAM-speed, which is still better than even fast SSDs.