memory upgrade performance

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Apr 03, 2004, dep wrote:
>quoth Ken Moffat:
>| I have 256 megs memory and am thinking of going to 512. Will I see a
>| large difference in performance?
>
>depends.
>
>run top for awhile and see if during the course of things you ever 
>exceed the need for 256.
>
>one place where i've seen performance boosts, albeit not vast, is in 
>compiling fairly big things; i gather that given the opportunity gcc 
>will cache some stuff in memory, but this is just a guess. noticed it 
>even with going from 1.0 to 1.5 gigs.

More memory is very useful, one might say essential, for some programs such
as the gimp when editing large images and OpenOffice.org unless you want it
to do a good Windows emulation -- crashing frequently.

We're building new machines with a minimum of 512MB RAM.

FWIW, I've found that PC100 RAM is pricey enough today that it may be less
expensive to replace the main board that uses newer, less expensive RAM (at
least it's a good rationalization :-).

Bill
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