Am Montag, 20. Februar 2012 schrieb Ralf Mardorf:
> On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 10:17 -0500, Allan Wind wrote:
> > Memory is cheap. More is better as Linux uses it for disk cache
> > if nothing else.
>
> For heavy audio production I never noticed that even the swap gets
> touched with 4GB RAM.
That does not give any clue whether Linux would use more RAM as disk cache
if it had it. Linux might not touch swap yet even when it would utilize
more RAM for disk caching and thus be faster with more RAM.
Well lets have a closer look on a 8 GB machine:
martin@merkaba:~> free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7783 4559 3223 0 201 1082
-/+ buffers/cache: 3275 4507
Swap: 12287 282 12005
Already here Linux utilizes more than 4 GB of RAM. But it doesn´t use all
8 GB of RAM, not even for disk caches. But after waking up from
hibernation to disk it was not running for long today.
One KDE 4.7.4 session, Kontact, KMail, some other small apps.
Now I start LibreOffice Writer 3.4.5 and Iceweasel 10:
martin@merkaba:~> free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7783 4891 2891 0 202 1302
-/+ buffers/cache: 3386 4397
Swap: 12287 281 12006
Linux continues to utilize even more memory.
Minus caching already 3,3 GB RAM is in use. So with 4 GB RAM there would
not be much space for disk caching. Granted that some applications might
be less greedy with memory allocations when not so much of it is
available.
So while 4 GB would work for a KDE session with some apps, heck even 2 GB
would work, 8 GB should give some performance boost - possibly rather
little, considering that the Intel SSD 320 in that ThinkPad T520 is quite
fast for an SATA 300 SSD. But still RAM is an order of magnitude faster.
10 times at least compared to an SSD. More than that for a harddisk.
Given the price of RAM I would put 8 GB in for 64 bit Linux. At least I
would make sure that I have the option to do it later. Which should be
true for any recent desktop/tower motherboard - when its not for Atom or
something like that.
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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