[tempguy9999]

Ah good, a response instead of an unhelpful downvote or 2.

I guess it's from experience, that when there's a bottleneck in my work and in many other areas I've seen it's down to lack of ram hitting VM.

Now lack of CPU is less crippling in a way, the CPU just divides n ways and things run proportionately slower. If paging happens, it can easily be far worse than lack of CPU as disk is so slow (ok, SSDs these days may ameliorate that; I've no experience there).

So why? Experience suggests lack of ram is more common than lack of cpu and the effect is worse. Of course the best thing to do is examine your system before you take anyone's advice, including mine.

[SomeOldThrow]

I would take 64 gigs of memory/4 cores over 16gigs/12 cores any day. The idea of many core is simply less preposterous than it was even a few years ago.

[tempguy9999]

Oh heck yes, at least IME. I work in DBs and in a company I worked for were renting 16GB machines for the hosted service for their clients. I almost literally armtwisted them into upgrading to a 64GB dev machine. When they saw how that ran, within 3 days they'd started rolling out 64GB machines to their clients. Perf difference was huuuge because the hot dataset could fit into ram at last.

As ever, it depends on one's needs, but most often that need is greater for memory. IME. YMMV. Measure first as always.