[ancarda]

16 GB. That was enough to load it into RAM, it was a matter of the "right tool for the right job". MySQL handles large datasets easily, probably because it's not trying to display all the thousands of columns x millions of rows at once.

I've found the same to be true for editors. Most text editors have struggled to open large log files (500+ MB) whereas cat can open a file of basically any size.

[EternalLight]

I've had a similar experience with editors, good old vim and less works but most other editors will crash or become unusable as log sizes increase.

Of cause, for parsing logs a few well thought out awk commands combined with sed, sort, unique and other *nix utilities usually beats everything else in my experience.