I stupidly only got 32GB and figured I would get more later because I spent more to get a good GPU. 32GB is feeling pretty limiting at the moment, but I'll just have to deal with it given the current prices.

Machine learning/data science stuff.

Local LLMs is half of it.

But that aside, I found myself working with huge files that swapped like crazy on my 32GB of RAM, or were completely infeasible to work with. Janky local experiments I wouldn’t want to run on a cloud instance billed by the minute.

128GB has been a godsend, but I could completely fill 192GB and still swap some if I had it.

But I found there are happy side effects to having so much disk cache, too. For instance, game modding/tinkering has sped up immensely over 32GB. So has hashing for transfers, or other scenarios where it’s useful to already have a file cached in RAM.

ah fair enough, worst case scenario if they dont know what to do with that much ram (I would build a homelab) they could also have a ramdisk

If you're able to have swap, Zswap is supposed to be better.

Zram is intended for devices with no swap