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32GB of Memory for what?

Just curious. Short of editing and creating special effects for professional HD or UHD movies or videos, what kind of tasks, programs or software needs 32 of memory in a Mac system?

Posted on Jul 12, 2014 4:56 AM

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Jul 12, 2014 7:45 AM in response to chrisfromhongkong

Lots of RAM can also support multiple applications running at once. While that can be done with less RAM too, it involves writing to disk what's currently not being used (paging out). Mavericks changed the terminology to "Swap Used" but the meaning is the same:


"The Swap Used value shows how much RAM is being swapped to the drive. If the value is large, your system is moving memory back and forth between RAM and your hard disk. Since swapping memory to disk is comparatively slow, increasing the amount of RAM could improve your system’s performance."


In addition, when the drive is an SSD rather than a hard disk, it's faster but writing to it is a more complex and wearing process than a HD (especially if it's a third party SSD and TRIM is not enabled), so swapping out is reduced or avoided altogether with more RAM.

32GB of Memory for what?

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