[Novalug] Laptop ram: 8 GB?

[John Franklin]

I concur.  My current desktop came with 4GB and two empty sockets.  I immediately upped it to 12GB.  I'm also running multiple VMs, browsers (which are bigger pigs than the VMs!), and do photo editing.  With 12GB it is rare that I swap, but not unheard of.  If I only had 4GB of RAM, memory would be better measured in RPMs, not nanoseconds.

My current laptop is 5 years old, and only supports 3GB of RAM.  (Yes, it's maxed out.)  I can run 1 VM on it, if I am careful to keep its memory footprint small.

My next laptop will have 8GB of RAM or more.

jf

On Oct 3, 2011, at 10:07 AM, Peter Larsen wrote:

> 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 at bronord.com
>>    Web Site: www.bronord.com
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-- 
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 39º 01' 58.4"N 77º 24' 49.6"W Z+84m

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