I'm not convinced that those applications need that much RAM, or if they're just written in an extremely lazy manner since they know they can just ask you to throw more hardware at it. By far most operations should be stream-based rather than random-access-based (which still would only required virtual RAM if you trust the OS to flush the mmap'ed pages), so they should only need a small chunk in RAM at once, and the rest can be paged out by an application-aware pager. Those two phrases don't go together at all. Web programming often uses 10x as much RAM as native, and even if fully optimized for the environment is fundamentally limited to 2x or 3x. And most web programmers don't have any understanding of performance at all.made to be very lightweight ... web programming