memory upgrade performance

[Kurt Wall]

In a 1.6K blaze of typing glory, Bill Campbell wrote:
> 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.

Indeed. I will trade a 100 to 150 MHz in CPU speed to get more RAM, as I
generally see more performance for the dollar out of the RAM. Frankly,
for normal desktop usage, including a good deal of program development
and text processing, 3 GHz is a waste. So is 2 GHz, but by giving up 
1 GHz of CPU, I can max out the available 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 :-).

Ayup. Whatever gets by the wife, eh? ;-)

Kurt
-- 
For perfect happiness, remember two things:
	(1) Be content with what you've got.
	(2) Be sure you've got plenty.