On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 06:19:09PM -0500, Robert Glueck wrote: > I'm thinking of upgrading my i686 system (Intel Celeron, 1.8 > GHz) from 512 MB RAM to 1GB (it uses PC133 SDRAM DIMM > modules). I'm assuming this upgrade will give me better > speed and performance. > > However, the memory module maker Kingston says that most > operating systems are optimized for a set range of RAM; > adding more RAM, to the extent that that's possible, may > not necessarily improve performance. > > I'm running Debian sarge with KDE, and I often keep more > than half a dozen apps open at any given time (one or two > browsers, news reader, news aggregator, IRC client, file > manager, azureus, editor, streamtuner, etc.). At times the > system gets to be a little sluggish. > > What is the behavior of Debian sarge? Would it run better > on an i686 system if RAM is increased from 512 MB to 1 GB? > > Of course, if I had 1 GB RAM available I could also install > one of the Linux live CD's (e.g. slax) on a big RAM drive > and run it from there, presumably with good speed. > > Another question: If I increase RAM to 1 GB, should I also > increase the size of the swap partition (currently 0.5 GB) > and how much? > > Robert I would say that yes, increasing RAM gives you better performance. This is especially true if you leave your machine running all the time. I recently upgraded from 1 GB to 2 GB and have noticed increased performance. The nice thing is that unlike other legacy operating systems, the Linux kernel handles memory very well and optimizes its use to maximize caching of previously used data in otherwise unused RAM. That is, if RAM would otherwise be empty, Linux will use it to store recently accessed information from disk and so on. If it needs the RAM for applications, it will remove the data. If it needs data that has been cached to RAM, then it will retrieve it from RAM and you will see the increased performance. -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto
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