


These are just numbers I found with minimal work, and with a little more research you can probably do even better. Rent a VM in the cloud, with 64 cores and 432GB RAM, for $3.62/hour.Buy a Thinkpad M720 Tower, with 6 cores and 64GB RAM, for $1074.In November 2019, with minimal searching and very little price comparison, I found that you can: You can either buy a computer or rent a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud with lots more memory than most laptops. The easiest solution to not having enough RAM is to throw money at the problem. If you want fast computation, data has to fit in RAM, otherwise your code may run as much as 150× times more slowly. However, even the more modern and fast solid-state hard drives (SSDs) are much, much slower than RAM:

Your computer’s memory (RAM) lets you read and write data, but so does your hard drive-so why does your computer need RAM at all?ĭisk is cheaper than RAM, so it can usually fit all your data, so why can’t your code just limit itself to reading and writing from disk? Why do you need RAM at all?īefore we move on to talking about solutions, let’s clarify why the problem exists at all.

The problem is that you don’t have enough memory-if you have 16GB of RAM, you can’t load a 100GB file.Īt some point the operating system will run out of memory, fail to allocate, and there goes your program. You’re writing software that processes data, and it works fine when you test it on a small sample file.īut when you load the real data, your program crashes.
