Single RAM Stick Limits Video Server Throughput Despite Idle Capacity

An IT team building a video analytics server found its CPU pinned at 100% while packet loss and instability grew, even though standard tools showed spare memory. Performance counters revealed an instructions-per-cycle value of 0.3, meaning cores spent most of their time idle waiting for data from RAM. The culprit was a single memory stick providing only one channel, so memory bandwidth, not capacity, became the bottleneck for frame-heavy video decoding. The authors argue that memory channel count and bandwidth matter more than total RAM volume for such workloads. They suggest that conventional monitoring utilities can mask this kind of hardware-level constraint.