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Author Topic: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?  (Read 2495 times)

inbound

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Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« on: February 22, 2011, 09:50:41 PM »
I use Windows 7 on my desktop due to having lots of programs that I'm used to not being available on linux (there are alternatives but I'm too lazy to learn the differences and am always too "busy" to force myself into it) - I host on linux systems so I really should switch...

I'm considering a new desktop that will work better with the larger amounts of data I am processing now (mainly in memory resident DB's or lookup tables). Also Excel seems to "not respond" quite often but comes back to life if I leave it (think it's a shuffling of data back and forth to the swap).

The system I'm looking at is a dual Xeon server board with 96GB of RAM - do you have experience of how well Windows uses such amounts of memory - am I better biting the bullet and putting linux on the machine?

Would very much like a larger amount of RAM but going to 144GB with 8GB sticks means you must reduce to 800Mhz and 16GB sticks are really expensive.

What would you do?

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Rooftop

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Re: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« Reply #1 on: February 23, 2011, 09:02:46 AM »
I assume that you are using 64bit windows and pro or above, otherwise you are way over the usable maximums there anyway.

However seems like total overkill to me.  Sounds like you might be better off structuring your databases better (if it's an option).  I'm no hardware expert that seems way out of kilter with anything we've needed on a desktop and we do fairly intensive stuff here.

What would I do?  I'd move the data in to SQL/mySQl, deal with it there, structure it better, build appropriate indexes then have a holiday paid for with the saving in hardware costs and taking up the time I saved watching excel do very little!
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bill

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Re: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2011, 04:38:21 AM »
Are you using Excel 2010? There is an option when you install to either go with 64bit or 32bit. The 64bit version of Excel is supposed to be the only reason to ever try 64bit Office. It handles much larger spreadsheets. Otherwise I usually recommend people stick with the 32bit version. Most add-ins you had from previous versions of Office will break in the 64bit version.
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inbound

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Re: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2011, 06:40:15 AM »
Yes it's the 64 bit version (which I use to easily try lots of variations of data tasks before coding them in php/mysql, it's amazing how quickly you can find out what works and what doesn't). The ability to work with a million rows at a time is handy, especially when you have formula's you're tweaking in lots of columns - but it seems there is a limit to how much you can do before Excel throws a wobbly - hence the question about how well windows/excel works with lots of ram.

I think I'd be better opting for a different solution, maybe 12GB on the PC and a new dev server.
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Rooftop

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Re: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« Reply #4 on: February 24, 2011, 09:56:25 AM »
We're doing some reasonably complex stuff in mysql with around 3 million rows per  table, using joins that (were they structured badly) would be measured in billions quickly.  Running that on a fairly standard desktop with 8GB RAM, but we're doing it in mySQL.  Different way of working, but worth some thought if you are dealing in big data sets. 

I still dump results to excel when I want to play around in a bit more detail, but I'm dealing with much smaller subsets by then. 
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PaulH

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Re: Do you use a lot of RAM on Windows? Am I daft in considering my new system?
« Reply #5 on: March 10, 2011, 10:00:02 AM »
Same here, have script running 24/7. 16gb data, Average table is 3 millions row, up to 64 million -
This sever is on vista 64, 8gb machine that doubles as my desktop.
Using latest beta versions of mysql for supposed better multi core support.
Heavily optimised mysql config and DB - still has some unavoidable slow queries, taking several seconds. But for us that's not a big problem as most time is spent crawling 100,000's urls a day.

More ram would and better performance would be nice - but then i'd run in to another bottleneck - cant hit some of these servers too hard so would have to build in a delay.

---
Moved a site from a 4gb server to a 16gb server and lots of problems went away, but 100'sgb sounds mental ;)
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