Record RAM Prices: Measure Linux Memory Before Buying More
The first time I priced out a memory upgrade this year, I assumed the listing was wrong. It wasn’t. DRAM contract prices are now more than four times what they were in the third quarter of 2025, and suddenly a question that used to be a no-brainer — “should I just add RAM?” — is worth actual engineering time again. That’s what this series is about. For years, throwing memory at the problem was the rational move: RAM was cheap, engineer hours weren’t. In 2026 that math has flipped, and before spending money at these prices you want to know whether the constraint is real memory pressure, reclaimable cache that only looks like consumption, or one process that nobody has looked at in months. This first part builds that answer — a reliable baseline. Part 2 configures swap, zram and zswap , part 3 contains services with cgroups , and part 4 puts it all together into a plan and a buy-or-optimize decision . ...