Quote from: mb300sd on November 14, 2013, 07:26:39 AM

Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on November 14, 2013, 07:17:45 AM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on November 14, 2013, 05:29:58 AM

memory increase is worth far more than upgrading any other component.

Desktop with 8 GiB and 1 Mb/s spent 2+ weeks to download blockchain.
Virtual machine with 256 (or 512, not sure) MiB and 100 Mb/s spent 1.5 days for the same.

RAM is not the silver bullet.

RAMdisk, not only RAM. The biggest bottleneck is disk access, when disk == ram, that goes away.

Indeed. And, as I think I mentioned before, the biggest download speed enhancement is having a RAMdisk on the sending side. Writing the block file out sequentially isn't hard for spinning disks to do. Seeking backwards through it one un-aligned jump at a time is murder.

RAMdisk -> magnetic drive isn't much slower than RAMdisk -> RAMdisk, but it beats the crap out of magnetic drive -> anything.