I think he miscalculated. His point still stands, just not with 20 browser tabs.

The important bit is "running our software" - depending on the complexity of said software, 200MB is pretty meh.

wait, i had windows xp with firefox and all at 256 mb ram ! which i got later upgraded to 384 mbs because i reused another 128 mb ram chip :)

In ~2003, I replaced my desktop that had been Intel-based with a Duron 800MHz system, only I didn't have enough budget to get it the RAM it required (new/different slot iirc), so I only had the 128MB it came with (whereas my old machine had 768MB cobbled together from like six dimms).

I figured that one hop over 100Mbit Ethernet to remote memory was going to be faster then swapping to spinning rust (remember this was before consumer SSDs, and onions on our belts), so I made a ramdisk on the old machine and mounted it over the network with the nbd (network block device) kernel driver, ran swapon on the nbd and boom, extra "512MB" of RAM.

It worked amazingly well, and (knock on wood) none of my roommates ever tripped over the Ethernet cables.

So you're the guy who actually managed to "download more RAM". Congrats!

On a more serious note, gonna add that trick to my book - still plenty of rust spinnin' round

Infiniband QDR adapters are amazingly cheap and RDMA-aware software can use DMA to poke directly at memory or devices in the other system.

Yes. Needed ~150MB per container. It was just simulating end points - ie, TCP connections back to a central system.