Jeremy Figgins wrote:
[...] I'm sitting right now in front of my 1gig machine. I have my normal set of apps open: firefox, thunderbird, konsole, etc. How can I tell if I would benefit from additional RAM? What command and what output do I need to pay attention to?
You've already seen many replies to your question. Most of them focus on paging and swapping (and actual swap usage, but that's not a good idea). When there are a lot of these activities on your system, then you could obviously benefit from more RAM. However, even without these activities you could probably benefit from more RAM because the additional RAM can be used as cache. Unfortunately, this is hard to measure. In general, if data are already in cache and data don't have to be read from disk (again), then things go a lot faster. Disk access is slow and data throughput is low compared to memory access and throughput. That's why the overall performance of your system from a user's perspective can be better with a 2.6GHz CPU and more RAM instead of a 3.2GHz CPU and less RAM. But be careful, this observation does not hold in all circumstances (depends on how much RAM there is, the use of the system itself: storage server, compute server, desktop system, etc.) and one needs to check each individual situation... Th. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org