What is the amount of memory I need to run IDz?

This is a common question we get. Many desktops or VM’s start with a default of 8GB of memory installed in the computer (or assigned to the VM), but often, users will see lagging performance.

In short, 8 GB of memory does not allow for both the OS and tools such as MS Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel to be open along with IDz. For example, the standard VM with 8 GB of physical RAM is utilizing 72% of that RAM upon startup; without loading any programs other than the default startup applications.

If I open Outlook, Word and Excel (with empty doc/workbooks), common tools used by anyone, that RAM utilization climbs to 81%, which leaves roughly 2 GB of free RAM. 

And technically that is 6.7/9.2 GB of committed RAM, meaning Windows has already cached 1.6 GB of RAM; meaning swapping to disk has already occurred, causing performance issues for this VM. And this all without loading IDz

The official minimum requirements for IDz are 3 GB of ram, recommended 4 GB or more, which you can look up on the IBM Software Compatibility Reports website.

So lets start up IDz on an 8 GB VM….  Now we have 91% of physical RAM in use, 10.0/12.2 GB RAM committed. And this is just with loading IDz.  As you continue to use IDz it will consume more memory, as any program would when you start loading data and such.

This is where things start breaking down and IDz  becomes extremely unresponsive; as well do other programs suffer because of having to cache memory to disk. And keep in mind this is all virtual memory and disk, which comes with its own overhead.

So, in the end, is it possible to run IDz on a machine with only 8 GB of RAM, yes.  But it is an extremely painful experience. As you can see from the above numbers, 12 GB of RAM would make things better, but even with that we are beginning to bump the threshold; and we haven’t even done anything other than load these programs.

In summary, this is why we always recommend 16 GB of RAM.