For what it's worth, the OpenBSD team is working on improved buffering for high-RAM machines:
"Computers today have immense quantity of unused memory. This new software almost works, we still have some minor bugs to fix, but the results so far are incredible. On computers with 16GB of RAM we can dedicate as much as 13 GB to buffering and almost no data is read from the hard drive, everything is in the RAM. It performs even faster than SSDs. We only have to write to the disk anymore and that’s mainly for reliability reasons. I estimate we’re a year away from the whole thing working flawlessly. From this aspect the 6 month release cycle is a bit limiting."
Pretty sure that's wrong except in contrived disk-heavy workloads. RAM needs power in proportion to its storage size.
My 2009 MBP, which I immediately upgraded to 8GB RAM on purchase, has never come close to the stock advertised battery life. And, supposedly a reason Apple optimizes iOS devices for such small RAM sizes (sizes which are never emphasized in published descriptions) is that minimizing RAM is an important factor for their long battery life.
