memory question

**garyhibdon** · January 13th, 2011

not sure exactly where to put this posting at, so i thought id try here.

how much memory can ubuntu 10.10 support? i know windows XP would only support 3.8gigs.

any ideas?

**dFlyer** · January 13th, 2011

32 or 64 bit system?

**garyhibdon** · January 13th, 2011

32 bit. sorry, thought i had put that in there.

**Chris Edgell** · January 13th, 2011

I would have thought it would be the machine not the release...am I wrong?

Or maybe each has it's limits and you go by whichever one comes first...

**mikewhatever** · January 13th, 2011

32 bit OSs can't see more then 4GB, but then, some of the memory addresses are reserved, so that you get 4-the reserved amount. How much is reserved depends on the machine.

**garyhibdon** · January 13th, 2011

i have an asus P5KPL-am epu and it SUPPOSEDLY supports 8 gigs. thats why i was wondering. the price difference between 4 gigs and 8 gigs is like $100 so yeah

**Verbeck** · January 13th, 2011

Originally Posted by mikewhatever

32 bit OSs can't see more then 4GB, but then, some of the memory addresses are reserved, so that you get 4-the reserved amount. How much is reserved depends on the machine.

how about enabling PAE?

**cascade9** · January 13th, 2011

Better question- why do you want 8GB? For most people its pointless.......

Originally Posted by Chris Edgell

I would have thought it would be the machine not the release...am I wrong?

Or maybe each has it's limits and you go by whichever one comes first...

Yes, both have limits.

**Paqman** · January 13th, 2011

Originally Posted by garyhibdon

i have an asus P5KPL-am epu and it SUPPOSEDLY supports 8 gigs. thats why i was wondering. the price difference between 4 gigs and 8 gigs is like $100 so yeah

Unless you're doing something really hardcore you're unlikely to see any performance improvement between 4GB and 8GB, so i'd pocket the difference if I was you.

I have 4GB, and never use most of it except when I run fat VMs. Ubuntu will run quite happily on 1GB.

**-kg-** · January 13th, 2011

Really quite entertaining!

Originally Posted by Paqman

Unless you're doing something really hardcore you're unlikely to see any performance improvement between 4GB and 8GB, so i'd pocket the difference if I was you.

Until when? I remember years ago I had a computer that had around 38 GB of hard drive space in 3 hard drives. People told me I was crazy to have that much hard drive space...what was I going to use that space for? Now..."You only have 38 GB of HD space? How can you do anything with that? You need more!"

Same with memory. I have a laptop that I bought in 2000 with WinME installed. When I upgraded to XP, I had to increase the memory in it to the max in order to run XP with any semblance of speed. Max memory? 364 MB.

Originally Posted by Paqman

I have 4GB, and never use most of it except when I run fat VMs. Ubuntu will run quite happily on 1GB.

How much longer will 1 GB run efficiently? 4 GB? 8 GB? I don't know, and neither does anyone else. My little laptop is still running...I have Ubuntu 10.04 running on it, and with 364 MB it just barely runs. It may be that Ubuntu 20.04 will just barely run on 1 GB of RAM.

If you can afford it and want it, go for it...you'll either find a use for it, or might need it in the future. Same goes with processor cores. Currently there is very little software that uses multiple cores to maximum effect, but I use one of them....BOINC distributed computing projects. BOINC will use every processor core available...if you have a quad core processor, it will process 4 work units simultaneously.

32 bit Ubuntu (and Linux in general, if I'm not mistaken)_will recognize over 4 GB of RAM if you use the PAE enabled kernel. I personally use 64-bit Ubuntu, even though I don't have over 2 GB of RAM on any of my computers. If they have a 64-bit processor, I have the 64-bit OS installed. I haven't had any major problems with the 64-bit kernels for several releases now.