RAM use in SNAP

[marpet]

Hi

yes, 8GB is at the lower end of the requirements. We would recommend 16GB or more.
Here in the FAQ you can read about it.
https://senbox.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SNAP/pages/1898053693/SNAP+FAQs#What-are-the-minimal-requirements-for-SNAP%3F

Adding more memory does not necessarily mean a faster processing, but it can help.
Your i5 has probably 4 cores. This means there can be 8 threads in parallel.
With an i7 or so you can have 16 threads at the same time.

But in general you computer is not bad, just a bit short on memory.

In the end more power is in most bases better.
But not always, see my post here:

How to parallelise the snap

In general SNAP does the parallelization automatically, but it does it on a tile basis. The data is split into tiles and each is calculated on a separate thread. But if your data has only 4 or 8 or 2 tiles, then only these number of threads are used. The number of tiles depends on the size of your input images and also how the tiling is defined by the data format. Beside this there are algorithms which prevent a meaningful parallelization based on tiles because they need the full image as input…