[bmurphy]

Just because you have 16gb of memory doesn't mean you won't ever swap. Firefox is not the only application running on a computer. My working set is routinely over 7gb and I have 8gb on my laptop. A goldfish will grow to full its bowl. If I had 16gb, I know I could use it. Every little bit counts.

[StavrosK]

Really? How? I'm currently coding and browsing the web and I'm only at 1 GB, out of 2. Sure, the VM isn't on, but that's still another 500 MB.

[darklajid]

I don't understand what surprises you. The memory load depends in large parts on the work requirements, I'd guess.

2 weeks ago I went from 4 GB to 8 GB (still would love to have more) here at work, because 4 didn't cut it and lead to lots of paging.

  Visual Studio (often 2 or 3 instances, grabbing around 300-500 each)
  MS SQL Server
  IIS
  OCR Engines (depending on load)

With Windows 7 as host (already not a slim OS) this killed my productivity with 4 GB, especially if (to get back on topic) I opened my beloved Firefox...

[justincormack]

Same here but from 8 to 16 on both my desktops. Huge improvement under Windows, less under Linux with SSD. Working habits vary, but I multitask a lot.

[LogicHoleFlaw]

I've easily burned through 8GB of memory when I'm crunching numbers on large-ish datasets in Octave. (And through twice that when I had a bug in said Octave code...)

[samspot]

In my stack eclipse + tomcat hits up to 1300mb, plus leaky firefox with another 1gb, and windows and everything else at about 1.5gb. 4gb is barely enough.

[barrkel]

Windows 7 sidebar.exe on my machine regularly wanders north of 4GB, until I restart it.

(It just shows a clock and my CPU core temperatures.)