How much RAM do we need for evaluation installation of SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

Finally I downloaded SharePoint 2013 preview edition, then got shocked by the minimum hardware requirements:

• Installation Scenario

Single server with a built-in database or single server that uses SQL Server

• Deployment type and scale

Development or evaluation installation of SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

• RAM

24 GB

• Processor

64-bit, 4 cores

• Hard disk space

80 GB for system drive

 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485%28office.15%29.aspx)


So, Do I need to give my SharePoint development environment 24GB RAM?


No.   It turns out not so bad.  My host machine is a desktop with 8GB RAM, 7200RPM Western Digital WD1002FBYS. The CPU is four core Q6600 (2.66GHz). I granted 4 GB RAM to the virtual machine, and it works  OK . After rebooting the SQL Server and IIS, it took around 1 minute to load the first page. After that, it's as quick as SharePoint 2010.


Possibly the only tip is about SQL Server RAM configuration. I put 1GB limit to it. (For SharePoint 2010, I usually give it 500MB).

Update (24/07/2012):


I noticed that there was a process took quite a lot of memory:

Obviously, if the development environment doesn't have enough RAM, it doesn't make sense to run a "memory caching" service which consumes more than 600MB memory. So we can disable it through SharePoint Service Management page:

We can get more details from here