this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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I want:
So generally this means:
RAM prices makes this.... Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it's about 5 years old now, and it's time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM....
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn't actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn't the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what's eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I'd expect it to be pretty effective.
I don't know how applicable it is to your use case, but there's ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla's sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven't used it myself.
My predicament, personally, is that my computer is starting to feel slow to me but I'm on AM4 and ddr4. The good jumps in performance are to be had in moving to the newer generations, which means that buying ram cannot be avoided. The suboptimal move is to stay on this legacy platform and be satisfied with marginal gains while investing further into hardware that will become obsolete sooner
Or use zram/zswap on Linux with ZSTD compression, which dedicates part of physical RAM to compressed swap.