What are the usage limits of Zynthian related to the RAM installed in a RPI5?
What I can’t do with a RPI5 2GB that I can do with a RPI5 4GB?
No limitations. Oram is based in 64bit Raspnerry Pi OS, so zynthian can use all memory you have.
Anyway, zynthian is quite efficient regarding memory, so you need to push hard to use the memory. I never saw any of my zynthians using more than 2 GB of RAM.
Please, note this is going to change a little bit with the arrival of “zynbleton” and “clippy”, the new audio clip launcher, that is designed to take profit of larger quantities of RAM, so perhaps we will see zynthian snapshots using 4GB or more in the near future.
Perhaps @riban can tell if he has tested clippy with many / big audio samples. I remember we did some estimations about RAM usage with clippy and agreed on “keeping code fast & simple by allowing RAM to be used generously”, or something like this.
As @riban has refactored clippy several thousand times from then, i couldn’t say what is the current state of my statements. Perhaps he rediscovered a long time ago forgotten technic for storing one zillion audio clips in 640KB of RAM 
All the best,
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information from Modartt:
Hi Paolo,
When running only one instance of Pianoteq, 1GB should be OK (assuming the OS let Pianoteq use at least half of that). 2GB may be a safer choice.
Regards,
Niclas Fogwall
Modartt
I seem to remember being told that 64KB should be more than enough for anyone… (I may be embellishing a tad!)
We are developing an audio clip launcher. There is likely to be several thousand more iterations 
but it currently relies on some RAM per clip to cache a the start and then streams from file but it usually creates a temporary file which is in /tmp, which is a RAM disk. So we want a bit of RAM for this. We did some calculations and for an estimate of very large usage we need about 1.5GB of RAM, just for clip launcher. If you have fewer that 16 channels of clips and less than 30s per clip and some mono clips then that size reduces. zynthianOS consumes almost 1GB and each processor consumes resources so realistically I would recommend a minimum of 4GB for an audio clip based workflow. We can do more detailed benchmarking later in development.
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Ha! It was 640KB….
Mr Gates, who achieved a Microsoft machine on every desk, then didn’t know what to do next!
Isn’t RAM expensive, for the quantities we like to use?
Ironically, it’s the Pi3’s of this world that make for easy simple clip players. Pi5’s have overheads, but obviously they have the footspace required.
Longest performance I ran on the previous clip player was 8 hours a day from Power on/off for a month on a Pi4 & hifberry Amp card. Never failed once.
Wouldn’t trust little old ladies with Pi5 althou’ if the Church’s ladies could link it up with the organ’s MIDI out…. . .
Perhaps they could use a Pi5?
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Brag.
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Not true… now there is a 1GB model the 2GB owners have earned bragging rights!
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