[wplug] How much performance increase with more memory?

[John Strange]

man vmstat :)

On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 12:26, Tim Lesher wrote:
> 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...