What applications, if any, benefit tangibly from more than 4GB of RAM? [closed]

It's not really any single app using so much RAM, but the fact that you can run so many application simultaneously without paging the disk like crazy.

Databases can eat up huge amounts of memory both RAM and on-disk.

"Um, what about Photoshop, VMs, some large RTS games, etc.

Anything thats manipulating images, especially large ones, will benefit from more ram, as will games that require massive amounts of storage to hold data on units/the map/physics/etc. And of course the more RAM you can feed to a VM the smoother it will be."

"The first thing you will probably need for using 4GB or more of RAM is a shift to 64-bit OS.

Beyond that,

Virtual Machines, Microsoft AppVirtualization updates
Visual Studio, then and now with RAM Disks

But, going towards more RAM and moving to 64-bit OS has its own constraints.
A lot of the usual stuff is not yet quite stable (or even available in some cases) for 64-bit systems.

Worthwhile question -- Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?, even 4GB"

"Applications that are designed to run for long periods benefit from more RAM.

Common examples are Exchange and SQL server. Admittedly, these applications also will benefit from higher disk throughput, but RAM will also help immensely.

RAM is like internet bandwidth - while you don't necessarily see performance increase on a single task, you do see a a reduction in the slow down that occurs as a result of multi tasking. (Bandwidth doesn't necessarily make everything faster, but it does allow you to do more things using the same connection at a much higher rate than a slower connection.)"