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Article: How Much System Memory Is Really Enough?

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mouser:
From an article by Bill O'Brien:

When it comes to adding memory, we all have to deal with the cost vs. speed equation. So how much memory do you really need? Our tester got some surprising results.

How much memory is enough? That's a question that's bothered me -- and thousands of other computer users -- for years. And so far, I haven't seen too many answers that have really satisfied me.

--- End quote ---


http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=161300002




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Josh:
When it comes to ram, I believe there is only one true philosophy, You can never have enough.

Carol Haynes:
Strange conclusions (or results) in the article. It may happen but I can't really see how adding memory makes things run more slowly - there may be something screwy with his mobo or BIOS settings. Also if you want 2Gb why not have 2 x 1Gb modules rather than 4 x 512Mb modules (which would be more expensive) ???

Surely the point is that having more memory doesn't necessarily make things faster (though for some apps such as Photoshop it will) but that it also allows you to have numerous large apps loaded simultaneously without resorting to pagefile swapping ??

Josh:
Thats what I got from it Carol. And I do find that while more RAM wont make a significant performance boost after say, 1GB, it will stop the constant thrashing caused by Page file reads and writes. In fact, since putting 2GB in my system (waiting for vista before I go to 4 since XP only supports 3.5GB without the x64 edition), I have disabled the page file entirely. If I ever were to use it again, I would attach a spare drive and dedicate it to that purpose (I have a few 1-5GB drives lying around). Nowadays, I think the idea of the page file will soon be eliminated as it will become unnecessary with systems getting more and more RAM. Perhaps systems bought by mom and pop will still require it as they usually come with the bare minimum (most dell pc's ship with 256MB ram) required to run the OS plus a few apps, but a majority will come with 1-2GB standard in the near future, thus eliminating that requirement for the page file.

f0dder:
2gig of ram here, XP32, disabled paging file as well. It's wonderful :). I'm glad I don't run Adobe apps though, or I'd probably still need the paging file.

Adding more ram == slowdown indeed only should happen with screwy motherboards.

4x512 vs. 2x1024 is stupid. Especially if you run AMD64 chips, some of them have buggy memory controllers which can cause system instability if you run at DDR400 speed... so if you're "full loading", you need to revert to DDR333.

Using an old drive for swap can't be recommended, it could easily end up slower than having swap on whatever drive you have all your other stuff on.

Swap will, unfortunately, be necessary a long time yet, as long as we have sloppy coders like the ones at Adobe.

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