Today I had to upgrade my local development Steem node with another 16 GB of memory making it a total of 32GB as things were getting too much for the already available 16 GB of system memory. Here is a screenshot showing the system running with 24 GB and the Windows 7 installation with nothing much other than Steemd 0.14.2 running - using a bit over 19 GB of RAM, the steemd process only is at about 17 GB or memory usage. Do note that this is not a witness only node, but a development one as well, so it is using more memory than usual witness only nodes, but still the demand of system memory is already pretty high and will only continue to increase...
So what is the solution on the long term, hopefully a future version of Steemd will be able to help in reducing the requered system memory for nodes running it. A few days ago Steem 0.14.4 Shared DB Preview Release was announced for testing. This release is powered by the new so called Shared Memory database architecture that is supposed to make things better including memory usage. Hopefully it should also help with faster startup and shutdown times as well as faster resyncing of the blockchain as this is something that already takes up quite a lot of time even with a very powerful hardware and the use of an SSD for storing the blockchain. I have not yet tested the preview release, as I'm pretty sure it will not compile from source on Windows out of the box... yet another thing that needs to be worked on.
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