[ale] Upgrading RAM?

[Brian Pitts]

David Tomaschik wrote:
> Slightly OT, but I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to upgrade the 
> RAM in my desktop.  The machine is a 2.8GHz P4 (HT) and currently has 
> 1GB of PC3200.  It has 750GB of disk, and a fairly normal report from 
> 'free' looks something like:
> 
> $ free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          1011        920         90          0         71        339
> -/+ buffers/cache:        509        501
> Swap:         2008        455       1552
> 
> 
>  From newegg, 2x512 would run me about $55, 2x1GB for about $105.  I 
> realize there's a lot of RAM sitting in buffers and cache, but it also 
> seems to throw a lot out to swap.  I mainly use the machine for 
> development, web browsing, email (Thunderbird probably uses 1/3 of my 
> system memory at any given time), and for remote file access (via SSH). 
> Is it worth upgrading?
> 
> David

On a slight tangent...

You can adjust the tendency to swap applications vs. shrink cache by 
echoing a value from 0 to 100 onto /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. The higher a 
number set here, the more the system will swap

"My point is that decreasing the tendency of the kernel to swap stuff 
out is wrong. You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's 
untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, 
use the memory for something useful." -Andrew Morton

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

-Brian