The overkill one, or the ridiculously overkill one?
Posted by: bigbolshevik in Permanent Articles, Technology Stupidities, Web/TechToday in the Surf The Channel forum, somebody asked which of two computers they should buy.
One was $6000 and had 8 gigabytes of RAM. The other was $3000 and had 4 gigabytes of RAM.
I couldn’t believe it - people were telling the poster to buy the 4 gigabyte one and upgrade it! Why on earth would anybody doing normal desktop computing need 8 gigabytes of RAM? Why would anyone doing normal desktop computing need 4 gigabytes of RAM?
So I decided to run some tests. Note that “cache” is memory that is used to speed up certain operations, but in low memory situations it is freed for use to directly run programs. That is why it is mentioned seperately.
TEST 1: “Idle”. I ran my usual configuration of Gnome, Compiz, and Epiphany browser, making a total memory use of 266 MiB.
TEST 2: “I like to think of myself as a power user”. I ran all those plus the following:
F-Spot
The Gimp (with a 4 megapixel image)
Inkscape
Krita (with a different 4 megapixel image)
Pidgin
Evolution Mail
Flock web browser
Google Earth
Openoffice.org Calc (with a small spreadsheet)
Memory used: 898 MiB. Cache: 600MiB. Total: 1.5 GiB RAM. The second 2GiB RAM chip would not even be touched yet.
Test 3: “Let’s crash this thing”. Here is a list of everything that ran before X died.
Gnome
Compiz
Tomboy Notes
Calculator
Character Map
Dictionary
Disk Usage Analyser
Terminal
Text Editor
All Gnome Games (all 16 of them)
Cheese
F-Spot
Gimp (4 megapixel image)
GThumb (4 megapixel image)
Inkscape
Krita (4 megapixel image)
OOo Drawing (a couple of lines)
Salasaga
Scribus (a leaflet I made up earlier)
Flock
Epiphany
Pidgin
Evolution Mail
Skype
Google Earth
Xchat
OOo Presentation (editing “linuxdays.odp”)
OOo Calc (editing a small spreadsheet)
OOo Writer (editing my 3-page CV)
While looking through my “Other” in the Applications menu, Compiz and Cheese crashed at the same time… I’m sure one caused the other to go, but I don’t know which one went first:
Oct 3 13:09:05 chris-desktop kernel: [ 4814.699339] compiz.real[6536]: segfault at 019100b0 eip 08055a6d esp bfe01290 error 4 Oct 3 13:09:05 chris-desktop gdm[5970]: WARNING: gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting :0 Oct 3 13:09:05 chris-desktop kernel: [ 4814.809726] cheese[7468]: segfault at 00000004 eip b727cfd4 esp bff25c90 error 4
Xorg didn’t successfully come back up, but the kernel was still running.
Watching my little indicator on the Gnome panel, I had observed that the cache had hit the top of my 2 gigabytes, and was purging some of it to open new programs. By dead reckoning, approximately 1.5 GiB of my 2 GiB were in active use by programs at the time of the crash.
Ironically, I think the crash was caused by lack of memory, but NOT lack of system memory. It looks like my meagre 256 MiB graphics card ran out of its graphics memory due to all the Compiz’ed windows open, and caused X to crash. I don’t really have the money at the moment to buy a new 512MiB card to test this.
So, do you really need 4GiB of RAM to do your work? Hell no! Even a power-user will not hit 3GiB of RAM used. Even if you include cache!
Next time you hear someone talking about “I need 4 gigabytes of RAM in my notebook”, tell them to instead look at buying a computer with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a bigger hard disk, faster CPU, faster memory, better graphics card, or bigger battery. Those things will improve your computing experience much more than a massive amount of unused memory.
(Testing was done on the following computer:
Ubuntu 8.04
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850
2x DVD burners
Asus P5K Premium mobo
WD 500gig HDD
Asus EN8600GT silent graphics card with 256MiB onboard
2 gigabytes of Kingston 800MHz RAM
Logitech Quickcam Go that does not work on Ubuntu 8.04
There is no swap partition. All software tested was from the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories where available; otherwise from Medibuntu, otherwise from getdeb.net.)
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[...] the overkill one, or the ridiculously overkill one? next time you hear someone talking about “i need 4 gigabytes of ram in my notebook”, tell them to instead look at buying a computer with 2 gigabytes of ram and a bigger hard disk, faster cpu, faster memory, better graphics card, … [...]
I have ran a PSU calculator with this graphics card and it says
I can concur that 4 gigs of RAM is probably overkill for most desktop users that do typical tasks.
Hell, I do a lot of graphical artwork in GIMP on 2GB RAM, with a 512MB graphics card, and this is usually more than enough for me, (the only exception being when i was working with a large-format 10MP image in GIMP… things started getting meaninglessly slow, so I had to upgrade to get more RAM)
Its not really important i guess…just thought I’d put in my 2 cents.
My system:
Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid) Kernel: 2.6.27-9-generic (#1 SMP Thu Nov 20 21:57:00 UTC 2008)
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+
4048 MB 800MHZ RAM
500GB Samsung SATA2 HDD
260GB Seagate SATA2 HDD
The other side to this is that GNOME, OpenOffice and some of the other apps aren’t exactly lightweight. If configured correctly, and XFCE environment with the likes of Abiword or GNUmeric would do the job just as well. If you really wanted, you could just use LXDE if you really wanted to save on RAM.
It would be interesting to see the results for the same test if you were running Vista. I suspect this is one reason (apart from bigger numbers = bigger $$$) why manufacturers are pushing more RAM.
Well, I’m in-between a power user and a casual user. I like to run between 1 and 7 apps at a time, the most ever being 4 workspaces each with 2 windows (Super-gimp :o) and I ran that fine on…
Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Hardy 32-bit
3.0 Ghz AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+
512mb DDR2 memory
30gb Maxtor SATA2 HDD
She’s an oldie, but runs great