RAM?

[dflemstr]

Buy an i-RAM RAMdisk kit.
Put 256MB of RAM into it.
Plug it in via USB.

Mount the RAMdisk as swap space.

This might actually be feasible (not considering the fact that the max speed's 480 mb/sec and the internal memory bandwidth is going to be used up pretty quickly...)
Good for extra swap, though.

But anyways, '256MB ought to be enough for anybody'. It's plenty of memory; don't judge it by PC standards.

 

[darkblu]

since we're talking ram here: the move to 256MB was a really wise one. that actually allows running Xfce *and* some actual X applications without having kswapd be the major user of your cpu.

 

[Aethix]

Yeah, it doesn't need very much RAM, since it isn't running Windows or anything.

 

[Kramy]

My Ubuntu box (it has 1GB) hardly ever passes 256MB used, even when torrenting (Deluge - 100MB) and with Totem media player open.

Firefox is RAM heavy, but how many programs can you use at a single time? :lol: 256MB should be more than enough.

Edit:

Yeah, it doesn't need very much RAM, since it isn't running Windows or anything.

Windows can be modded to use just as little RAM. I have an XP box that uses 35MB after a reinstall. Once I get it set up with all the programs it needs, it's up to almost 70MB at boot!

Open Firefox, and that's a whopping 120MB of RAM used. You just have to cut away all the extra stuff that Microsoft packages with Windows.

 

[DAP]

My Ubuntu computer has 6 GB ram. I've seen it use as much as 4 GB while stitching together some pictures. 256 MB is adequate for a hand held, but I'd always want more.

 

[WizardStan]

My only fear is Firefox. It's rare for it to use less than 700 megs of ram.
Of course, I'm a tab whore. I don't close anything >.>

 

[lulzfish]

Protip: Close things.

I regularly run about 0.9 GiB / 1.9 GiB with KDE 4 and a few Konqueror tabs open. And Akregator. And Kate with the source code for my secret project open. Also, Amarok is paused in the background, and I'm IMing someone.

But I can get by with 256 MiB easily once I drop KDE 4 and all the RAM I'm probably using just for Kwin and its compositor.

 

[ilovevideogames408]

What about creating a swap partition on an SD card?

 

[Kramy]

What about creating a swap partition on an SD card?

It'll trash your card, but yes, it is doable.

Only buy high quality cards if you plan to do that. (maybe something from Sandisk or Lexar) Lower quality ones can be just as fast, but die thousands of writes quicker.

 

[lulzfish]

You could do that, but the swapped programs will take so long to swap back in that you'd almost always be better off just closing programs you don't need.

edit: And it will wear down the card when you swap stuff, so... Just close the programs you aren't using. Swap is too much trouble.

 

[dflemstr]

(Click to enlarge, didn't wanna insert the pic directly here)
lol...

I usually have more RAM than this, too... I currently have to refrain from having too much running at the same time
Will I be able to adjust my work flow to use less memory when I get my Pandora?

BTW, don't see this as a confirmation of that Java consumes a lot of memory; I'm compiling 5 webapps and running one of them with those Java instances...

Interesting note: Firefox 3.5b4 actually consumes LESS memory than Konqueror, and surprisingly little considering that I had a 128000x102400 image open They have really improved their memory management in this version. Or maybe it's just some improved swap algorithm in Linux 2.6.29.3? Or maybe something Fedora 11 related? We may never know

 

[riumplus]

The idea of having 'spare' RAM not being consumed has always seemed a bit of a waste to me. If there's RAM spare, something should consume as much of it as it can to cache whatever will increase the computer's speed. Even caching the first 512kb of commonly-used files in RAM or something, but I always thought there should never be large amounts of 'spare' RAM left over. Your RAM should ideally always be full caching something, on the off-chance if you ask for that data you don't have to wait for your hard drive to serve it up. And if a program actually needs that RAM it can release some of these caches at the drop of a hat.

I've noticed Firefox does a similar thing by managing its cache levels internally - run it on a computer with 4GB of RAM and it can climb up to 1GB, but run it on a machine with only 512MB and it rarely goes over 100MB (as happens on two of my machines here; both running Firefox 3.0 under XP but they consume vastly different memory amounts).

 

[lulzfish]

IIRC, Linux uses extra RAM as disk cache / file buffer space, and auto-shrinks it whenever a program allocates some "actual" data.
Windows and Mac are probably the same, since extra disk cache seems like a handy thing to have available.

Then, when somebody allocates RAM, they gets some of the extra cache space, and the cache drops the files that are being used the least.

 

[MistaGiggles]

Xbox 360 only has 512mb Ram, and I think the PS3 only has 256mb of ram.

It's not about the amount of RAM, it's about the developers skill in using it to it's fullest potential.

 

[Tor]

Linux accesses files through RAM, so that when another program accesses the same file(s) it'll get the data directly from RAM without bothering with actually reading the mass storage device. Even if the original program that first accessed the file is long gone.

File data will stay in RAM until some other program needs the RAM for something (which could be actual memory allocation, or just another file access), if there's no free RAM already available. Even data written to mass storage will stay in RAM for a while, so that if another program reads file data written by another program it can get it even if the data hasn't hit the physical medium yet.

And so on and so forth. The net result is that Linux will, after a while, use all available RAM and the 'free' program will show only a small amount of unused RAM. That's as it should be, it gives the best performance for the general case.

 

[DAP]

Xbox 360 only has 512mb Ram, and I think the PS3 only has 256mb of ram.

It's not about the amount of RAM, it's about the developers skill in using it to it's fullest potential.

If all you want to do is play games, 256 MB is more than enough. I intend to use my Pandora for other things as well though. More is always better.

 

[WizardStan]

And so on and so forth. The net result is that Linux will, after a while, use all available RAM and the 'free' program will show only a small amount of unused RAM. That's as it should be, it gives the best performance for the general case.

I don't think that's right. I could be wrong, but my experience is that "free" returns the memory that is available to a program. Any memory used from cached files isn't reported, it's just invisible usage since it gets returned the instant any other process needs it. Either that or I don't have file caching set up correctly on my system, which is also a possibility.

 

[Klaus]

And so on and so forth. The net result is that Linux will, after a while, use all available RAM and the 'free' program will show only a small amount of unused RAM. That's as it should be, it gives the best performance for the general case.

I don't think that's right. I could be wrong, but my experience is that "free" returns the memory that is available to a program. Any memory used from cached files isn't reported, it's just invisible usage since it gets returned the instant any other process needs it. Either that or I don't have file caching set up correctly on my system, which is also a possibility.

free should report the amount total/used/free/shared/cached memory.

 

[WizardStan]

free should report the amount total/used/free/shared/cached memory.

Yeah, I actually took the time to read the man page. I'm just an idiot sometimes

 

[michaeljustman]

My only fear is Firefox. It's rare for it to use less than 700 megs of ram.
Of course, I'm a tab whore. I don't close anything >.>

Even with 30+ tabs open on Firefox, on Windows, or Ubuntu, my memory usage never goes much over 250mb... perhaps it helps that I use Adblock, Flashblock, etc, so there's not much more than text and images on the pages.