While checking my shopping cart afterwards, I noticed that I had added the item to my cart twice. 64GB of RAM? After years of holding back, why not? Ordered. And to think I went to all the trouble last week of increasing the swap on my Arch Linux from 4GB to 32GB for nothing. That was a bit tricky since my root partition didn’t have enough space. Thanks to drive encryption, resizing the partitions wasn’t exactly straightforward, and in the end, I just put the 32GB swapfile on the /home partition.

But even if the swapfile is on an NVMe SSD, the SSD’s speed is still limited. I have a Samsung 980 Evo installed, which can theoretically read at 3,500 MB/s and write at 3,000 MB/s. The four new RAM sticks run in two groups, each with a read and write speed of around 20 GB/s. So, that’s 40 GB/s combined, which is about 10 times faster. But it’s not just the raw throughput that’s higher; much more important are the response times. An NVMe SSD has a response time of 10-30 microseconds, whereas DDR4 is at 10 nanoseconds, making it at least 1,000 times faster. That really becomes noticeable with a lot of access operations.

The RAM sticks haven’t arrived yet, though. And I’m not home until Friday. I probably won’t have time on Saturday, but on Sunday I’ll install the sticks, see what clock speed I can achieve, and then test them extensively. I’m definitely excited to see how much of a difference the upgrade makes.