I used to work within a team of windows admins. I saw them strugling with applications requiring too much memory for Windows 32bits. Maybe some people run Windows 64bits, but i've never seen that: applications comes from everywhere and are 32bits only. Moreover, the kernel/user split is 2G/2G and that's pretty small for a Java process. Most servers i've seen have 4GB of memory (usually only 3GB are managed on common^Wbroken configs) and are dedicated to a small set of applications, so there's really no point in adding more memory. Oh, and yes, we run hundreds of Windows servers, not for fun.

But i've switched back to the bright side and left that windows world: i now play with unix servers, big filers and tape libraries. I've just realized that most of the linux workstations are 64bits and have at least 8GB of RAM. Yup, that's twice more than the biggest Windows servers we run...

This week, we had to recover a somehow low-end server and install RHEL on it. When i say 'low-end', i mean an old Dell or HP server garbage-collected to set-up some test environment, nothing valuable to the company. The server booted, and damn, the RAM-check took 40s ... 49152MB. Yes, 24 x 2GB on a 'low-end' server. So i asked my workmate why there were so much RAM on a simple server:

We don't tune applications, we add more memory. he said.

That's true unix speech :)