Improving performance: RAM or CPU speed (was: Re: New RAM, does Debian has a tool to benchmark?)
On Saturday, April 11, 2020 05:45:56 AM Tixy wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-04-10 at 20:01 -0700, David Christensen wrote:
> > My laptop is maxed out at 2 GB. If I open more than a few browser
> > windows with heavy JavaScript, the computer slows to a snail's pace.
>
> Would the amount of RAM affect browser JavaScript performance? Is that
> due to JIT compiler results not being able to be cached or something
> like that? I've just assumed slow performance it due to CPU throughput.
Back in the old days (when I found my computers slower than I liked), I found
that adding more RAM was usually a better approach to improving performance
than getting a faster CPU. Not sure how to quantify that, but I like to have
at least 12 GB in any computer I use.
That was especially true when CPUs started to reach the point (around 3 GHz.,
iirc) that their improvement in speed slowed down. (But it was also true
before that.)
If I had a computer that I was dissatisfied with the performance, I would
definitely add RAM to try to get up to 16 GB or so. Only then would I think
about getting a faster CPU.
Aside: The idea of extra cores sounds good to me, but I don't know how much
software actually takes advantage of this (or if the OSs / kernels) are
typically smart enough to distribute tasks across multiple cores -- I hope
they are, but really haven't been paying attention.
I think my bottleneck these days is again RAM, on my daily driver I have 16
GB, but sometimes have 1000 or more tabs "open" in Firefox (on Wheezy).
("Open" is a little misleading -- occasionally Firefox crashes. When it does,
I restart it and choose the option to restore all tabs (or whatever it says),
the old tabs show up with their names, but the content from those URLS is not
actually loaded (or fetched) until I click on one of those tabs to view it
again.
(Actually sort of a nice feature -- it lets me keep easy access to lots of
pages without filling up RAM.)
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