[Novalug] Laptop ram: 8 GB?

Peter Larsen plarsen@famlarsen.homelinux.com
Mon Oct 3 10:07:22 EDT 2011


8GB has been my laptop (work) standard for years now. I guess it depends
on what you do on your laptop - for me, I constantly hit the ceiling and
suffer the death of swapping. Several DBs, developer tooling,
application servers, heavy browser usage etc. and there's not one
primary application that's not happily requesting at least 2GB each.

For instance, I do a lot of proof of concepts these days. One of my laps
is a cluster demo. I run 4 guest VMs and a script that creates between
200 and 500 sockets per second showing how the clustering distributes
the load AND allows me to kill a node to show what happens too. 8GB is
barely enough to do this - one false move, swap starts to go WAY up and
things comes to a crawling halt - taking 10s of minutes where it should
take a few seconds only.

You can NEVER have too much ram in my opinion. 


-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
I'm going to Boston to see my doctor.  He's a very sick man.
-- Fred Allen

On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 18:35 -0400, Roger W. Broseus wrote:
> Roy,
> 
> One additional thought. I find that I'd never use 8 GB of ram. I can
> have multiple applications open and never come close to that. Usually
> it's at less than 1 GB and no use of swap. And here's a fun test I
> just did. I was using .7 GB of ram with multiple apps open, e.g.,
> Thunderbird and FireFox.
> 
> Started VirtualBox and am now running, in virtual machines, both Win-7
> and XP. Usage climbed to 2.9 GB with negligible use of swap.
> 
> So, unless you are using an application that really requires a lot of
> ram, you might just save some bucks. I run 2 GB on my ThinkPad and can
> even do Win-7 in a virtual machine without topping out.
> 
> (Throw no bricks.) 
> -- 
> --
> Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
>     Email: RogerB@bronord.com
>     Web Site: www.bronord.com
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