Do I need more ram?

[CJ Master]

Hello,

Well I'm a software geek, not a hardware one, so I need your help. Do you guys think that if I put some more ram in it'll boost up my system a heap?

I currently have 900 megs and I'm using an AMD Athlon 64bit processor 3500+

And I've been hearing of these quad-chip motherboards, if I happened to get the money, would it drastically speed my pc up, or just a bit?

[Half-Left]

You dont need more ram but while it's cheap, why not.

[cardinals_fan]

You have similar specs to me. The answer to your question depends on what you do with your computer. My 1 gig of RAM is plenty for my uses. The only time I break 512 MB used is when I'm batch editing photos.

[OutOfReach]

I have 1gb of ram, and I was considering upgrading to maybe 2gb or 3. But I realized that I don't even use half of my 1gb.

I would say no, you really don't need more than 1gb for a Linux system.
But that's my opinion.

[bekind2thenoob]

I have an AMD64 3500+ also on a fairly standard HP desktop that came with a gig of ddr2 RAM among other upgrades i added another gig of fairly low speed RAM and the speed boost is hugely noticeable well worth adding if uve an extra £20. as for quad core cpus? can't comment but they are supposed to increase both speed and the mulittasking ability of your machine.:guitar:

[Frak]

Depends on what you do. If you do video, picture, or any batch process, then yes. If you just play games and browse the web, kinda, but that's only because some games use a lot of RAM, and Firefox is a memory hog.

[speedwell68]

My machine came with 512mb and Edgy was fairly quick with that much. When I went to feisty I upped it to 1.5gb, that made it fly. When Hardy came out I stuck it up to 2gb, which is my laptop's maximum. Now I'm on Intrepid and by god this PC is quick with 2gb. (check my sig for specs). I'd say yes upgrade your RAM, not out of necessity, like with Vista, just because it is nice to have a quick PC. As said memory is nice and cheap.

[Thirtysixway]

More ram can't hurt, it just depends on if you're using a lot of it.
Doing things like photo editing and running virtual machines (vmware, virtualbox, qemu) suck down a lot of ram.

[kerry_s]

Hello,

Well I'm a software geek, not a hardware one, so I need your help. Do you guys think that if I put some more ram in it'll boost up my system a heap?

I currently have 900 megs and I'm using an AMD Athlon 64bit processor 3500+

And I've been hearing of these quad-chip motherboards, if I happened to get the money, would it drastically speed my pc up, or just a bit?

i don't think you need more ram, if things feel slow, perhaps you should try lighter program alternatives.

[andrewabc]

If you notice your ram usage normally approaches 80% of total ram, then yes you would need more ram.

I'm using ubuntu, and have 3gb of ram. But I never go over 700mb of ram. Normally use 550mb.

[archer6]

When I'm running Ubuntu, doing research on the web, and have a lot of tabs open in Firefox the extra memory really pays off. Other than that, I agree with others that say that 1GB is fine for all around use. If your doing resource intensive work then 2GB, I run 3GB but it's because I need it in XP for my work. That said, I'm now down to only having to boot into XP about 15% of the time, everything else I do in Ubuntu....yeah! When I'm booted into Ubuntu it flys...:)

[spupy]

My laptop came with 512MB. Both Ubuntu and Gentoo run fine with these. Then I got a 20€ gift card from Amazon and decided for 2GB Corsair RAM. Couple of days ago I noticed that I barely scratch the 600MB mark. I was pondering on returning the RAM. But then I said: "The hell, its 25€, its not that much for a little comfort!"
I turned my swap off and instead of closing programs, I minimize them on another desktop. :)

Also, if you have TOO much unused RAM, you can try this:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-296892-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html
:twisted:

[decoherence]

Gosh darn, I'm good! I didn't even have to read the message!:lolflag:

[Sinkingships7]

Gosh darn, I'm good! I didn't even have to read the message!:lolflag:

Exactly what I was thinking. :p

More RAM is always helpful. You will notice the difference.

[cardinals_fan]

More RAM is always helpful. You will notice the difference.
Even if I only use over 256 MB about once a month, and never over 512?

[bufsabre666]

Exactly what I was thinking. :p

More RAM is always helpful. You will notice the difference.

thats only true on the sub 1gb level, i have 4gb, i want to goto 8gb cause i do alot of vm stuff, but at that size ram the speed performance would be negligible

[archer6]

In giving this a bit more thought, I remembered that on one of my ThinkPads, an R51e, I'm only running a 1.5ghz Celeron, 768mb ram, Ubuntu 7.10, and it's very fast.

Quite amazing really. It was my first Linux Laptop and not knowing what to expect, I was truly amazed at how well it runs, how stable it is and how quick it is considering it was the bargain entry level $690 ThinkPad when new. The cheapest model they offered, I bought it just as a test bed for Linux so as not to have to disturb my mission critical ThinkPad T60p for work.

In the final analysis, I think that 1GB is most likely the sweet spot for most general usage.

And now? I'm using Ubuntu for a minumum of 80% of all my work, and could not be happier.

Cheers...

[Eisenwinter]

I would happily upgrade my RAM, to like 8GB, but it's DDR400 :(.

Right now I only have one GB.

[Frak]

The best way to speed up your computer is to upgrade your processor and/or HD(s). RAM only if you swap a lot.

[ssam]

get lots of RAM and install preload. that will make you applications load faster.

[andrewabc]

get lots of RAM and install preload. that will make you applications load faster.

I tried preload for a couple days. For whatever reason when I checked the text file that lists the programs it load into memory, it had none listed. So I had no idea whether it was loading the programs libraries into ram or if it was doing anything at all.
I have 3gb of ram, and rarely use more than 600, so I would like to use preload, but it didn't seem to do anything for me :(

EDIT:
here (http://www.techthrob.com/tech/preload.php) is some good info on preload

Would have been nice if ubuntu had updated preload in the repositories before intrepid release, since the current version in ubuntu is out of date. At least they updated (http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/preload) it for Jaunty.

What is ld.so.preload-manager ?

A utility to manage the libraries in /etc/ld.so.preload
A small Perl script to manage the libraries that are listed in
/etc/ld.so.preload.
So would that be installed as well? What does it mean a script? I installed and ran it and doesn't seem to do much that I can see.
andrew@andrew-desktop:~$ ld.so.preload-manager
Usage: ld.so.preload-manager [-r] [-y] library
--version,-version,-v : print version number
--help,-help,-h : print this message

EDIT: looks like preload is working for me now.

[Mon Nov 17 19:48:14 2008] 2056580kb available for preloading, using 101476kb of it
[Mon Nov 17 19:48:14 2008] readaheading 337 files

[ssam]

i think ld.so.preload-manager is different and unrelated. I dont think you want it.

[andrewabc]

i think ld.so.preload-manager is different and unrelated. I dont think you want it.

Thanks, I got rid of it.