[wplug] How much performance increase with more memory?

[Tim Lesher]

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

One good way to find out is to put your machine under reasonable load
and do 'cat /proc/meminfo'.  Do this a few times, while doing some
reasonably heavy things.  Then look at the results.  In particular,
look at the amount of swap being used.  If you're using more than,
say, 64MB of swap on your system, you should probably upgrade.
Particularly with OpenOffice, you'll probably find that this is the
case--I think the sweet spot will probably be around 256.

I don't know where you're getting your $200 figure from, by the way,
but I'm pretty sure that memory for that model should be a bit cheaper
than that... For example, PC Connection lists a 128MB DIMM for an
Inspiron 5000 at $35.00, and Dell sells them for only five dollars
more...

-- 
Tim Lesher <tim at lesher.ws>
http://www.lesher.ws