Your OS can use so much RAM, and Flash will be able to use a segment of that. My guess on your machine (where RAM and OS is the same as one of mine) is that Flash will cap out at just over a gig of (private working set) memory usage, maybe 1.2g - but that's a guess. One way to find out is make some duplicates of a FLA that uses a lot and open them up until you crash or see the low memory dialog.

A pretty hefty animation in CS5 should be fairly similar speed wise to Flash 10.0.2, and in our tests of very long animations they're often better than earlier versions of Flash (except for 10.0.0, which wasn't good).

For memory usage, you will see the memory grow and drop around a number with scrubbing and other operations. That said, memory usage (what you see for private working set) will possibly be higher than CS3. This tends to grow a bit with each release due to features, and with the stage player (stagecore) - but doesn't necessarily affect speed. We worked a lot on dropping this number (we tested back to CS3 to compare), and for some files it will be much lower than in CS4 and possibly CS3. It completely depends on the file at hand though (there are a ton of variables), so I can't say what will happen with yours for sure.

Let me know what you find!

I don't think the OS will be able to take advantage of it, and as such Flash won't be able to.

If you had 2 gigs of RAM and increased it to 4 gigs, you would see an increase in the memory Flash would be able to use (in any version of Flash). But I don't think you'd see a difference increasing from 6 gigs.

Update: Converted the file to CS4, performed the exact same operation, absolutely no qualms. Beautiful. Thanks Adobe.

I comfirm this, especially in combo with AIR 2.5

My app Prefab3D, has loads of classes, is compiling perfectly in CS4 only with additional ram (set to 256 mb) using AIR 1.5 to 2.0.3

Because the new 2.5 doesn't compile in CS4, I've installed in CS5 the AIR 2.5 SDK. Unfortunaltly, editing the pref file doesn't work.

All I get is a grey swf, no errors, compiler simply quits silently after being busy a minute or 2.

Same as in CS4, except you can allocate memory, that fixes this issue.

So I spend few hours to implement Air2.5 back in CS4 and finally managed to compile, problem (of course it could not have have been that easy)

is that the app.xml of 2.5 is not compatible with the package step.

CS4 adds incompatible tags to the xml on init, and then complains there are nodes in xml it doesn't want to see...

So to bypass this, I must do the most ridiculous thing. I have now 2 app.xml, one 2.0.3, one 2.5.

When it compiles, I use the 2.0.3 xml as a dummy, and get no errors when the publish window pops up. I swap then the xml by the 2.5 version

and hit the publish btn. It works now, but again, that's ridiculous and adds extra unecessary work. Especially frustrating  when you have an expensive CS5 that is supposed to do all this flawlessly! no?

So if there is anyway to make this soft usefull for my application by being able to increase memory, please speek up!

Fabrice