I tried to use refined storage to craft a bunch of chests using planks and it crashed my client with saying cannot do this because it took 32GB of ram

It shouldn't be able to allocate 32gb unless you set the launcher to allow this much. How much RAM do you actually have? I'd recommend setting the launcher to use 8 if you have 16 and a maximum of 10-12 if you have more.

I play on my friends server who has 64 gb allocated but when trying to bulk craft a chest in the crafting grid it kicked me from his server because of ram. I have about 12gb allocated through me client