I do mostly C++ dev work in Visual Studio, and occasionally run CAD/Engineering tools, in addition to processing large data files. ALso, I usually have 1-2 VMs running in the background (but they dont see much use). I used to think 16GB was enough, till I upgraded to 32GB. A lot of the benefit is derived from the fact that I never shutdown my PC, and so the cached data tends to stick around for a long time (last time I rebooted was around 75 days ago). I've run perfmon over the course of a week and watched my page faults drop as more and more stuff gets cached. I won't say its going to be the same for you but IMHO its worth a shot. You could at the very least test how much time you're spending on page faults over the course of a week or so since per-day savings would probably be minimal.