Arch Linux

Cromulent

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2011-08-28

Posts: 52

Website

Making use of lots of spare RAM

I have 16GBs of RAM which I use when booted into Windows but when I am running Arch Linux I rarely if ever get over 4GBs of RAM being used at a time.

I was wondering if there were some settings I could set so that more of my spare RAM is used for just generally speeding things up. I'm not entirely sure a RAM disk would help since most of my files are just text files from programming but there must be some way to make use of this much spare RAM.

I don't have any swap on my Arch install since it is unnecessary.

qinohe

Member

From: Netherlands

Registered: 2012-06-20

Posts: 1,556

Re: Making use of lots of spare RAM

Well, for instance, you could install graysky's 'profile-sync-daemon' & 'anything-sync-daemon'
You could setup tmpfs fro some file system parts.

Maybe there are a lot more options, but these I use, with the same amount of RAM as you.

arcon

Member

Registered: 2013-05-27

Posts: 128

Re: Making use of lots of spare RAM

You can check out this thread if you want:
Essentially, unused RAM is wasted RAM

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The short cuts are only short because they don't actually go anywhere. -- Trilby
Nothing feels better than being understood -- awayand
A pathetic dreamer

not_sure

Member

Registered: 2012-12-01

Posts: 27

Re: Making use of lots of spare RAM

I have 32GB RAM and keep /tmp with 50% of my RAM.

/tmp is used for temporary files.  That is usually where I extract files I don't want to keep.  I hate having to go through files that I could have deleted after I watched them.  Unfortunately, speed isn't great because of 1Gbps network bottleneck.

I keep it at 50% because that allows me to not worry about using too much RAM for the system/programs.  Example:  I'll run gimp when /tmp is full - gimp with an image that uses 15GB+ RAM - that would be a problem and I would be the dumb*** to forget and crash they system and lose data.

Never heard of Preload till now.

Cromulent

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2011-08-28

Posts: 52

Website

Re: Making use of lots of spare RAM

Thanks for the tips guys. Much appreciated.

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,731

Website

Re: Making use of lots of spare RAM

I too have 16 GB of mem and mount /scratch to tmpfs using 14 G max.  I do most things there like compile, download, video encode, etc.  data loss can occur if the system goes down, but that is rare and I always have a media bound copy of the important stuff.

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AUR packages • Zsh and other configs