In insulating materials, the orbital occupations are defined by a step function at 0 K such that states below the Fermi level have an occupation of 1 while states above the Fermi level have an occupation of 0. In contrast, metallic systems do not have a band gap, but instead have one or more bands that cross the Fermi level. Consequently, implementations of quantum chemical methods involving the numerical integration of the Brillouin zone on a k-point grid in reciprocal space , as is common in periodic DFT and beyond-DFT software packages, must account for this discontinuous occupation function in metallic systems. Without introducing temperature, converging such calculations typically involves the use of a very fine k-point grid. . A widely-used alternative approach to dense sampling involves using so-called partial occupations that are not exactly equal to 0 or 1 in the computational formalism. The step occupation function is replaced with a function that smoothly varies from 1 to 0 as it crosses the Fermi level, thus removing the numerical challenges associated with the Brillouin zone integral discontinuity. DFT and beyond-DFT packages typically implement the same small set of continuous occupation function options based on the Fermi-Dirac occupation function, the Gaussian function, and other more complicated functions. The first-order Methfessel-Paxton scheme (MP1) in particular is popular because it has been shown to yield converged total energies and other properties accurately and with the lowest compu-tational expense. There are multiple GW/RPA packages with partial occupations implemented and, in general, there is significant variation between their approaches. These differences range from formulation, basis-set choices, parallelism, approximations used to achieve a particular target scaling, and a number of other algorithmic and numeric differences. The lack of consensus in these areas gives rise to the diversity of implementations, systems for which a given implementation is valid, and subsequent results. Within the BerkeleyGW 32 computational package, the static subspace approximation has been shown to dramatically reduce the cost of full-frequency GW calculations by using the eigenvectors of the static polarizability to efficiently represent the polarizability at other frequencies in place of the full basis of reciprocal lattice vectors. This approach can also be used to calculate RPA total energies, but it has not been benchmarked for RPA calculations and with the use of partial occupations.