How much ram do you need?

Mr Green · 2008-05-07 04:58:57

I am building a new pc and was going to take out 2 gigs of my systems ram to put in it..

How much ram have you got? and what is the best amount to have [of course more the better!] never used even half my total memory even when running virtual machines

MrG

Allan · 2008-05-07 05:39:46

I find 2Gb good for my purposes and have that in both my current laptops. I think the minimum I would accept in a computer these days is 1Gb. I had to remove 1 RAM module from an old laptop leaving 512K and I did notice the difference. You may not "use" all your RAM but caching is good.

Mr Green · 2008-05-07 06:52:46

I think 2gig is fine for a desktop.... may take out a couple of sticks for new build, only other ram I have kicking about in parts box is 512mb :-)

skymt · 2008-05-07 07:16:54

My current desktop is entirely functional with 512 MB. It runs an Openbox or dwm desktop with Deluge, Claws Mail, mpd, Liferea, Emacs, and even the infamous RAM hog Firefox, all running simultaneously and rarely hitting swap.

Ink-Jet · 2008-05-07 07:58:06

I've got 1GB of RAM, and that idles at around 300MB full, with GNOME, Firefox and Preload - I've only ever really hit onto the swap while compiling or un-archiving. To be honest, I could probably live with only 512mb.

Mr Green · 2008-05-07 09:00:54

Will run 512mb until its set up :-)

Hohoho · 2008-05-07 11:44:11

I have 1GB, swap is used rarely, mostly when something is leaking memory in insane proportions (Penumbra: Black Plague demo).
Unpacking and compiling doest hit swap.

Gnome+openbox+swiftweasel(firefox)+mpd+sonata+pidgin

Last edited by Hohoho (2008-05-07 11:44:44)

byte · 2008-05-07 13:47:38

Except with my old notebook (366Mhz/256MB, which mostly sucks) I haven't encountered many situations where I ran into RAM limits. The machines I use have either 512, 768 or 2048 MB. The last time I remember when it really came to major swapping was when I loaded a 50 MB tcpdump capture file into Wireshark. Normal everyday usage is okay with 512 MB.

iBertus · 2008-05-07 15:01:08

I've got 8GB in this system and 4GB in my laptop. Granted, Arch Linux doesn't need that much memory and probably never will, but I'm sometimes booting into Windows for proprietary mapping and science type apps (ArcGIS, soil logger software) and it really crawls with anything less than 2GB. I'd say 2GB is the magic number right now for anything besides really hardcore science and gaming. I have an old S754 Athlon 64 box that had 1GB and it ran great in Linux and crappy in Windows. I upgraded it to 2GB and it runs the same in Linux but faster in Windows.

inXistant · 2008-05-07 20:43:30

Ive got 3gigs of ram and I *never* use my swap... Depending of what your run 1 or 2 would be enough.

moljac024 · 2008-05-07 21:34:14

I have 2 GB in both my desktop and laptop, and I don't think I've ever gone beyond 1GB usage. With Arch linux, I even stay below 512MB...

Procyon · 2008-05-07 21:53:07

I have 2 GB and some games in wine tend to take up more than a GB.

I wonder if mplayer uses a lot of RAM for large video files (I can't check right now).

Hohoho · 2008-05-07 22:56:16

Mplayer, x264 HDTV 720p BluRay rip, ~25mb memory usage

dav7 · 2008-05-08 00:12:33

Your systems must like you or something, since I often have Firefox, Geany, a terminal or 10 (I use urxvtd tho...) and such open... and my system is literally ALWAYS in swap. I'm thankful I made a 1GB swap partition, since my system often uses it. As I write this post my system is using no less than 513MB swap, and 421 of 494MB RAM. And I have, let's see... Firefox (24 tabs), 14 terminal windows (but only one process, remember), Geany, Baobab and Thunar.

Maybe it's because I ran a 64MB VM in VirtualBox yesterday? I have no idea. (I don't shutdown.)

Here's a screenshot (showing slightly more memory usage.. whatever):

-dav7

Last edited by dav7 (2008-05-08 00:20:31)

afu · 2008-05-08 00:26:39

320M here on laptop. Never any problems with Arch running KDE and more. XP with virus scanner, well, thats another issue at startup but fine normally. Processor is 1.3 celery. Yep - kinda old...

Army · 2008-08-14 15:02:24

skymt wrote:

My current desktop is entirely functional with 512 MB. It runs an Openbox or dwm desktop with Deluge, Claws Mail, mpd, Liferea, Emacs, and even the infamous RAM hog Firefox, all running simultaneously and rarely hitting swap.

Almost the same here, 512MB RAM, LXDE with Openbox, Claws Mail, Carrier (Pidgin fork) for IM, transmission-daemon with web interface (is being removed in the official package, don't ask me why!), Swiftweasel (optimized Firefox) (takes really much RAM, I'm waiting for midori to become really good), mpd (with ncmpd in most cases, ario as graphical option for guests or something). RAM is almost all time under 200MB, which is really great! Swap is only needed, when all apps are open and I compile an app, which needs really a lot of RAM (for the moment I don't know one, but they exist )

Of course, if you run KDE4 and do some virtualization or something, you will need more RAM and you will be thankfull to have 2GBs. And of course the larger disc cache makes your system all in all faster, that's for sure.

arch0r · 2008-08-14 15:46:00

it depends on your pretensions. i'm running here a fast system with lightweight apps and i've never ever reached the 500mb mark (1gb avaible).

bredin · 2008-08-14 17:20:38

4gigs in my laptop. And I can tell that my swap have never been used :3

Rokixz · 2008-08-14 22:50:11

I have 1,5 gigs of ram, but I weren't used up to 512 mb with gnome, but with kde, it uses ram how it can, so 2 gigs will be enough

lilsirecho · 2008-08-14 23:17:30

Use of ram is predicated on what your use your computer for. If only normal KDE use in archlinux, the use of 1GB satisfies those needs.

If the user decides to run Video editing and full-video in ram, especially in a r/o system, I find 4GB in my system performs excellently. As ab experiment, I ran four video files at once in ram and was able to observe them all and hear the audio from every one(not something you would normally experience!). It demonstrates the capability of large ram, however.

Best use of ram is performance related and I would bet on large ram along with the highest speed ram one can install in any new system. This would demand using the system for more intensive activities than surfing the net.

I have yet to experiment with other uses of large ram but certainly expect it to do wonders for other apps. Not having large ram prevents development of any useful applications.

For most apps, 1GB is good.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-07 04:58:57

How much ram do you need?

#2 2008-05-07 05:39:46

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#3 2008-05-07 06:52:46

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#4 2008-05-07 07:16:54

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