Once we have super fast reliable internet we’ll likely have the whole computer as a service. We’ll just have access terminals basically and a subscription with a login, except for the nerds who want their own physical machine.

Bro just reinvented mainframes.

They’ve been reinvented repeatedly. Citrix, terminal servers, thin clients, cloud desktops, web apps, remote app delivery…

Most people (not necessarily here) need a web browser and an office program. Most people are well suited to terminals or something like a Chromebook.

I need actual hardware for my job and hobbies, but even I have a mini PC set up like a gaming console so that if I want to play games on my bedroom TV I don’t have to hook up my Steam Deck or gaming laptop. I just stream them.

No. Just no.

And get off my lawn, ya whippersnapper.

RAM as a service can’t happen. It’s just far too slow. The whole computer can though. It’s RAM can be local so it can access it quickly, then it just needs to stream the video over, which is relatively simple if creating some amount of latency to deal with.

Mhmm… Computer as a service. Why does that sound familiar…?

You have to hand it to the French though, that stuff was pretty dope.

I was there, Gandalf. I was there, three thousand years ago.

Given how so many of us communicate, work, and compute using cloud platforms and services, we’re basically already there.

How many apps are basically just a dumb client using a REST API?

you will own nothing and be happy!

Wait, we already had that in the 70s.

You have to know that some dinosaur at ibm is screaming about how they gave up the centralized computer and is salivating over gigabit fiber so he can charge everyone 15 bucks a month to use an ibm mainframe.

Stadia almost didn’t suck, I bet we’re 10 years from phones just being hand terminals that tap into a local server and desktops won’t be far behind.

Like in The Expanse?

Exactly like the expanse.

Fucking love those books, am listening to one now.

Have you seen the Amazon show at all? How did you feel about it?

For many of us Stadia didn’t suck at all, except for the game library and Google lack of commitment.

sweaty gamers and nerds as always unite over having proper physical PCs rather than online services or consoles.

Given the digital literacy of many “regular people” (e.g. my father, and seemingly every other of my friends), the idea is appealing. Especially, as most of them don’t care about privacy. Give them decent availability, and they will this money at you. And if you also give them support, I will, too.

That’s exactly how it works right now with VDI. I’m using one at work.

Honestly, cloud gaming is very good… when it is good. Sometime it suck. But when it’s good it’s incredible how much it feels like gaming locally.

It’ll never be fast enough. An SSD is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than cache. Internet speed is orders of magnitude slower than the slowest of hard drives, which is still way too slow to be used for anything that needs memory relatively soon.

Need faster than light travel speeds and we can colocate it on the moon

A SATA SSD has ballpark 500MB/s, a 10g ethernet link 1250MB/s. Which means that it can indeed be faster to swap to the RAM of another box on the LAN that to your local SSD.

A Crucial P5 has a bit over 3GB/s but then there’s 25g ethernet. Let’s not speak of 400g direct attach.

modern NVMe SSDs have much more bandwidth than that, on the order of > 3GiB/s.
even an antique SATA SSD from 2009 will probably have much lower access latency than sending commands to a remote device over an ethernet link and waiting for a response

Show me an SSD with 50GB/s, it’d need a PCIe6x8 or PCIe5x16 connection. By the time you RAID your swap you should really be eyeing that SFP+ port. Or muse about PCIe cards with RAM on them.

Speaking of: You can swap to VRAM.

My point was more that the SSD will likely have lower latency than an Ethernet link in any case, as you’ve got the extra delay of data having to traverse both the local and remote network stack, as well as any switches that may be in the way. Additionally, in order to deal with that bandwidth you’ll need to kit out not only the local machine, but also the remote one with expensive 400GbE hardware+transceivers, plus switches, and in order to actually store something the remote machine will also have to have either a ludicrous amount of RAM (resulting in a setup which is vastly more complex and expensive than the original RAIDed SSDs while offering presumably similar performance) or RAIDed SSD storage (which would put us right back at square one, but with extra latency). Maybe there’s something I’m missing here, but I fail to see how this could possibly be set up in a way which outperforms locally attached swap space.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing here

SFP direct attach, you don’t need a switch or transcievers, only two QSFP-DD ports and a cable. Also this is a thought exercise not a budget meeting. Start out with “We have this dual socket EPYC system here with full 12TB memory and need to double that”. You have *rolls dice* 104 free PCIe5 lanes, go.

Bandwidth isn’t really most of the issue. It’s latency. It’s the amount of time from the CPU requesting a segment of memory to receiving it, which bandwidth doesn’t effect.

Depends on your workload and access pattern.

…I’m saying can be faster. Not is faster.

Yeah, but the point of RAM is fast random (the R in RAM) access times. There are ways to make slower memory work better for this by predicting what will be needed (grab a chunk of memory because accesses will probably need things with closer locality than pure random), but it can’t be fixed. Cloud memory is good for non-random storage or storage that isn’t time critical.

You can do it today, just put your swapfile on sshfs and you’re done.

So I could download more RAM?

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