[Discuss] smallest board that can handle 32 GB RAM

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 05/08/2014 09:04 AM, Kent Borg wrote:
> Compiling all of Android Open Source Project supposedly requires that
> much RAM, but I don't believe it. They are just saying that so people
> won't try on too slow a machine. Right?

Unfortunately, no. It really does suck up that much RAM. The compilation 
process hasn't really been a focus for the Android team.

> I can certainly imagine uses for RAM, such as big databases in RAM,
> simulating the physics of the real world (weather prediction, Pixar
> rendering their new film, cosmology simulations of the big bang, etc.),
> but it is hard to come up with much more without resorting to strategies
> based on waste.
>
> How will I end of using my 16GB? How will you use 32GB?

Let me tell you, having that much filesystem cache is fantastic.  I 
dislike IDEs (especially Eclipse, and doubly so Eclipse with the Android 
ADT plugin).  But to work without an IDE you're going to be doing a lot 
of grep operations.  With my box that has 16GB of RAM, I can grep across 
250k LOC in a fraction of a second.  The same operation on my box with 
4G RAM takes anywhere from 30 sec to minutes (depending on if I have 
firefox and/or eclipse open).

I have another box that has 4G, and when running proguard on the 
aforementioned 250k LOC android app, it basically eats up all memory to 
the point where I can't run anything else on that machine if I don't 
want it to thrash.

I'm not saying that the Android build process /has/ to be this memory 
intensive, I'm just saying that it certainly /is/ that way currently. 
And given the availability of cheap RAM, it seems they have not much 
incentive to optimize that...

Matt