When you start comparing costs, RAM is extraordinarily cheap. Under $10CAD/GB. I do contract work primarily, and hardware that saves time (e.g. by reducing the time for compile cycles) pays for itself very very quickly. I have a client who likes to have me work on-site and has development machines with only 4GB of RAM. Last year, we were doing builds that took minutes on my personal beefy machine, and an hour or two on theirs. The extra RAM would have paid for itself the first day it showed up, and would have paid a dividend every following day...

Agreed in full. My development desktop, a repurposed Westmere PowerEdge tower, has 96GB of RAM in it. The value I realize from being able to load everything I care about, ever into RAM significantly outstrips a faster CPU (not that 16 logical cores at 2.8GHz is holding me up or anything). Turns out that ramdisks are super fast--who'd have thought?

Good to see likeminded people here on that subject. I used to push RAM drives, etc in late 90's to early 2000's for critical stuff. People said it was crazy but performance and security benefits were great. Being re-discovered in past 5 years or so in cloud industry in form of "RAM sleds," etc. As if RAM making stuff faster was a new thing. ;)

Another benefit of tons of RAM is in special-purpose systems using memory-safe runtime and GC. The copying GC's were relatively simple to implement for me a while ago. When RAM expanded, I had one design that just used it for GC instead of more storage. Lots of space not utilized in normal case but imagine a whole app/service GC'd while running on tiny kernel w/ good exception handling. Never crashed. Imagine a desktop where similarly all the system services were memory safe and GC'd with a dedicated piece of hardware doing pauseless, concurrent GC. So, a crashless, fast desktop with critical stuff stored in RAM. I'll take it.

Note: Oberon Systems (eg A2 Bluebottle) use a GC language and run very fast. That with modern features, HW acceleration, and user-mode drivers.

Holy crap. Just checked ebay. I didn't realize how cheaply you could get ridiculous equipment like that. There's an older PowerEdge with 48GB of RAM for around $600. Hmmm... the credit card is feeling warm in my pocket...

Be sure to remember electricity costs in your calculations.

It draws less than my old desktop with a Nehalem I7 and a Ti. And it's only on when I use it. =)

Helps that I got it for free when a startup went down, too.