Comment by humanfromearth9
Comment by humanfromearth9 18 hours ago
Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB. The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly quit VSCode and restart it with all the serenity I could have in the middle of the night. Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?
> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?
It depends. It takes more energy, which can be undesirable in battery powered devices like laptops and phones. Higher end memory can also generate more heat, which can be an issue.
But otherwise more RAM is usually better. Many OS's will dynamically use otherwise unused RAM space to cache filesystem reads, making subsequent reads faster and many databases will prefetch into memory if it is available, too.