Re: How much RAM do I need?
"Henry Kingman" <hkingman@best.com> writes:
| > On the other hand, if your chipset can't cache more than 64MB, going to
| > 80MB might actually make some things slower. I'm not sure if telling the
| > kernel "mem=64M" on an 80MB machine would be enough to fix that problem
| > or not.
|
| Pasted below is an article from the ZDNet Web site about this. It seems to
| suggest that the L2 cache is somehow the limiting factor on RAM addressing
| capability (Is that right?).
That's partially correct. All the Pentium processors will address
quite a bit more than 64MB of RAM, the question is whether or not your
motherboard can cache more than 64MB. It's a pretty complex issue, but
it's becoming less important now that the PII has it's cache packaged
in the CPU module. I believe the PII's cacheable limit is in the GB
range.
Unfortunately it's even more complicated for laptops, since most of
them use proprietary chipsets. You'd really need to call HP and find
out if your laptop can cache more than 64MB. Either that or just play
it safe and go with 64MB.
| The HP800CT has a half meg of L2, which seems
| a reasonable amount. Plus HP itself actually produces a 64MB
| expansion chip for this model. So I'm guessing 64's the way to go.
As to the ZDNet stuff, I'd say it's crap. How much memory you need
depends entirely on what you do. I use my Linux box to do development
work on engineering analysis software. If I had gigabytes of memory I
could use every bit of it. That's not the case, but I use every bit of
the 128MB I do have and even with that hit the swap once in a while.
If you're just not aware of how much memory your daily activities
consume I'd suggest judicious use of free, vmstat, and xosview (if you
use X). Keep track of the numbers for a couple of days and see what
pops up.
Gary
Reply to: