I got 32 additional GB of ram at a low, low cost from someone. What can I actually do with it?
Open 1000 instances of vim
You can install it in a compatible computer.
Which I did
thanks
Excellent!
The best thing about having a lot of RAM is that you can have a ton of apps open with a ton of windows without closing them or slowing down. I have an unreasonable number of browser windows and tabs open because that’s my equivalent to bookmarking something to come back and read it later. It’s similar to if you’re the type of person for whom stuff accumulates on flat surfaces cause you just set stuff down intending to deal with it later. My desk is similarly cluttered with books, bills, accessories, etc.
im sorry but you can’t do anything with it i guess you’re fucked
Here’s what you can do with your impressive 64 GB of RAM:
Store approximately 8.1 quintillion (that’s 8,100,000,000,000,000) zeros! Yes, that’s right, an endless ocean of nothingness that will surely bring balance to the universe.
Unless something’s gone over my head here, this is off by around 6 orders of magnitude.
A long sequence of zeros compresses really well :)
I used to have a batch file to create a ram disk and mirror my Diablo3 install to it. The game took a bit longer to start up but map load times were significantly shorter.
I don’t know if any modern games would fit and have enough loads to really care…but you could
Depends… If it’s DDR5 it might not work with the other stick… I was unable to add on another 64GB to my desktop a last year and had to eventually just buy a whole new 128GB set.
You could build another computer/server and self host things…
It’s DDR4, I’m too poor to upgrade right now. Doubt I’d benefit from it much anyway. I am thinking of building a server however. I have most of the parts minus a power supply.
More than I could do on my Apple IIe at 64k.
I have 16 GB of RAM and recently tried running local LLM models. Turns out my RAM is a bigger limiting factor than my GPU.
And, yeah, docker’s always taking up 3-4 GB.
vram would help even more i think
Either you use your CPU and RAM, either your GPU and VRAM
Fair, I didn’t realize that. My GPU is a 1060 6 GB so I won’t be running any significant LLMs on it. This PC is pretty old at this point.
You can run a very decent LLM with that tbh
You could potentially run some smaller MoE models as they don’t take up too much memory while running. I’d suspect the deepseek r1 8B distill with some quantization would work well.
I tried out the 8B deepseek and found it pretty underwhelming - the responses were borderline unrelated to the prompts at times. The smallest I had any respectable output with was the 12B model - which I was able to run, at a somewhat usable speed even.
Ah, that’s probably fair, i haven’t run many of the smaller models yet.
Keep it and wait for the applications to bloat up. You won’t feel like you have an excessive amount of RAM in a few years.
Run a LOT of VMs
I can take 'em off your hands. Three fiddy.
God damn Loch Ness Monster, get your own damn memory!
You never have to close a browser tab again. If a window is full just minimize it and start a new one!
I hate having more than 5 open at a time. Apparently this is not normal.
The way it was meant to be
Only 5?
Or did you forget to type a zero or two?
5 tabs
Wow, I’ve got more than that pinned
I do the same. Spare tabs are bad and drain data.
I just hit 230 on my phone.
I’ve opened infinity on my phone if Firefox is to be trusted.
Mobile browser tabs are both too persistent in that they don’t get cleaned up when you close the browser, and too amnesiac in that they can kill a connection if they are placed in background for even for even a couple of seconds.
Its the worst of both worlds.
I used it for virtual machines and Docker containers.
One docker container per VM just to maximise the ram usage.
I unironically do this in proxmox. Keeps things nice and separate and i still have plenty ram left.
Any reason for not using LXC as PX has native support?
In my case, I’m not a fan of running unknown code on the host. Docker and LXC are ways of running a process in a virtual security sandbox. If the process escapes the sandbox, they’re in your host.
If they escape inside a VM, that’s another layer they have to penetrate to get to the host.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s better than a hole in the head.
I do use LXC but those are still pretty much a virtual machine.
I realise that you are making a joke, but here’s what I used it for:
- Debian VM as my main desktop
- Debian VN as my main Docker host
- Windows VM for a historical application
- Debian VM for signal processing
- Debian VM for a CNC
At times only the first two or three were running. I had dozens of purpose built VM directories for clients, different hardware emulation, version testing, video conferencing, immutable testing, data analysis, etc.
My hardware failed in June last year. I didn’t lose any data, but the hardware has proven hard to replace. Mind you, it worked great for a decade, so, swings and roundabouts.
I’m currently investigating, evaluating and costing running all of this in AWS. Whilst it’s technically feasible, I’m not yet convinced of actual suitability.
That just sounds like QubesOS with extra steps
costing running all of this in AWS
The cost will be oh, so much more than you’re expecting. I have not been at a shop where they didn’t later go “oh shit. Repatriate that stuff so it doesn’t cost us a mint.”
Yeah, I’ve been using AWS for many years. I’m familiar :)
Hetzner has better pricing if you don’t need to scale down dynamically.
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Compressed swap (zram)
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Compiling large C++ programs with many threads
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Virtual machines
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Video encoding
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Many Firefox tabs
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Games
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