this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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[–] suicidaleggroll@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] ace_of_based@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago

NERD!

seriously, nice rig phat stats

[–] jaschen@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] suicidaleggroll@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] IHawkMike@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The RA in RAM stands for random access; there is no seeking necessary.

Well there is, CPUs need to map virtual addresses to physical ones. And the more RAM you have the more management of that memory you need to do (e.g. modern Intel and AMD CPUs have 5 levels of indirection between a virtual and physical address)

But it also caches those address mappings, as long as your TLB is happy, you're happy. An alternative is to use larger page sizes (A page being the smallest amount of RAM you can address), the larger the page the less you need recurse into the page tables to actually find said page, but you also can end up wasting RAM if you're not careful.

[–] IHawkMike@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago

You clearly know more than me, but wouldn't everything from 4GB to 1TB have the same number of walks? And one more walk gets you up to 256TB?

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago

Oh yay, lemmy is finally popular enough to have a nobody asked e-peen guy!