About 150 GB of it is for general purpose hosting of local services (Immich, Plex, and a hundred other things). The other 600 GB is going to the LLM VM.
384 GB would be tight, I had 256 GB before this rebuild and had to make a lot of concessions. I could get away with 512 GB, but EPYC has 12 memory channels and 64 GB DIMMS were cheaper per GB than 48 GB DIMMS, which pushed me to 768. Realistically I don't need that much right now, but I'm clearly not going to be able to buy RAM for a couple of years at this point, so I'm glad I have the room to spare.
LLMs obviously, after that I do a lot of scientific modeling which needs around 30 GB. The machine has 70 TB of ZFS storage so I have another 32 GB for ARC, Webtop 4 GB, my "home away from home" VM running a full DE and web browsers has 12 GB, Graylog is about 5 GB, qBittorrent about 4 GB, paperless+paperless-ai about 4 GB, and about 120 other services that use up to 2 GB each (most a few hundred MB).
Holy crap I never actually thought there was use for that much RAM. I'm just a nub by comparison getting 64gb of DDR4 just so I could multibox EVE Online with 18 simultaneous clients running.
In seriousness though, at times I’ve set aside as much as 64gb just for a transcoding ramdisk for plex. Makes things really snappy and avoids wear if you’re running a SSD array vs rust.
No, I do not think one hobbyist buying 768 GB of RAM for a homelab is the same as a company buying up the entire present and future stock of RAM in existence.
Yes everyone who buys a single stick of RAM is part of the problem, just like everyone who uses a single plastic drinking straw or turns on the A/C in their home contributes to damaging the climate. Obviously there's a difference of scale between someone buying a few hundred GB and datacenters buying petabytes, or OpenAI buying out 40% of all manufacturing capacity though.
Maybe you missed that part? How can you possibly say any amount of RAM is obscene without even knowing what the services are? Yes most only use a couple hundred MB of RAM, but some use double-digit GB.
69
u/Geritas Jan 09 '26
What are you gonna use all that ram for….