By memory-intensive I mean applications that have to do frequent allocations and de-allocations. This is very common on the desktop. In HPC I think the more co

By memory-intensive I mean applications that have to do frequent allocations and de-allocations. This is very common on the desktop. In HPC I think the more common case is a big allocation at program start and then lots of processing to de-allocate only after the number-crunching part is finished. On servers it boils down to how quickly you can respond to network events and fire new processes.