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I read on Wikipedia about windows server 2012 (windows server 8) and I noticed the RAM limits are 4TB.. This made me wonder, what is the purpose of having that much RAM when there's no application that can even use as much?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows..._2012#Hardware
Well, there could be a lot of applications being used at one time being a server this is probably the case.
Virtualization. With the greater bandwidth available, today, as well as more than enough computing power, Virtual machines can each have as much ram as necessary. 32 virtual machines, each with 8GB ram is 1/2 TB ram. So several TB RAM is not out of the realm of requirement.
Also, being able to address that space [in the OS], and physically arrange the devices are two different things.
In 8 years 4TB of RAM will be not that much RAM.
"Nobody will ever need more than 64KB of RAM."
I seem to remember that some very knowledgeable person said that. How prescient!
I thought it was 640K and that he never actually said it.
-tg
Yes, 640K. That was the barrier based on the systems at the time. Extended memory; expanded memory; trying to get 590K (or whatever the app required) of memory after loading the CDROM driver, mouse driver, sound card driver, and the extended/expanded memory driver...
Oops, off by a zero. Well, a zero is nothing, so I wasn't really off at all....right?
64K was the memory page size. If you went beyond that you were into a whole new memory model.
RAM's performance is much faster than going to disk.Quote:
Originally Posted by Justa Lol
So for massive database servers, having an entire copy of the database in RAM increases performance, and the database only access the disk to commit changes.