[wplug] How much performance increase with more memory?

[Eric C. Cooper]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 10:01:34AM -0400, Scott F. Kiesling wrote:
> I am running Gentoo on a Dell Inspiron 5000, Pentium 3, 128M RAM. I use
> Blackbox for X and the applications I use most frequently are Evolution,
> OpenOffice, Phoenix, XMMS, and Praat (a speech analysis program). If I
> upgrade my memory to 256 or 512, does the WPLUG public think I will see
> signficant gains in speed?

You will almost certainly see a big improvement with more RAM, because
right now your system is probably swapping a lot.  (OpenOffice is
particularly memory-hungry.)  You can check by running the "free"
command and looking at the "used" column on the "Swap" row.

> That is, should I spend the $200, or wait for a while and get a new
> machine?

256M is $106 from www.crucial.com, and since shipping is free and
your system can take two SODIMMS, you can buy one, see how much
improvement it makes, and buy the 2nd one later.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Eric C. Cooper          e c c @ c m u . e d u