RAMming speed

Processors these days are fast, really fast. Unless you are gaming, rendering video or compiling large programs, you are unlikely to use more than a fraction of your available horsepower. More time is lost on I/O these days, transferring large amounts of data to and from storage devices. One way of greatly speeding up this process is to switch from spinning disks to SSDs, which are much faster. However, they are also far more expensive, especially if you have a lot of data.

There is often a cheaper, although not as effective, method of improving the situation - by adding more memory. If you have looked at a system monitor, or the output from free,