4.6 Concluding Thoughts

There's a simple moral to this story: your memory requirements depend heavily on how many users there are and what they are doing. Large technical applications such as computational fluid dynamics or protein structure calculations can require incredible amounts of memory. It is easy to imagine a computer with 2 GB of memory that could support only one such job, whereas that same system could support several hundred interactive users quite comfortably.

One of the greatest improvements in computing in the last two decades has been the ability to assemble large amounts of memory for relatively little cost. Take advantage of it.