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Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Rob Beard wrote: > >> Tom Potts wrote: >> >>> It all depends what your trying to use the pc for and the loading of the same. >>> If its only got a gig of ram then swap may be useful. Obviously RAM would be >>> faster but if you hardly ever use over 1G - and a linux server (?) probably >>> wont get near that unless you do some serious DB work on it - then swap is a >>> better option than 3G of ram doing nothing or not a lot. >>> I'm also not sure how swap works these days - in theory you can have a near >>> infinite amount of swap whereas as 32bit system can only ever use 4G of ram. >>> Tom te tom te tom >>> >>> >> Technically, on Ubuntu at least and I assume other distros, it is >> possible to use over 4GB memory on a 32-bit system, or at least it is >> using a 32-bit OS with 64-bit capable CPU by using the server kernel >> although I believe each process is limited to 4GB. >> > > A moden Linux kernel (2.6) can support up to 64GB of RAM on a 32-bit > platform. > I wonder how long it'll be before we start to see desktop boards that support that much. By my calculations my latest motherboards can support about 16GB assuming I stick in 4GB dimms, can't think what I'd need that much memory for though. > A single application can only ever see 3GB of that RAM though. Need to > move to a 64-bit processor to see more. > > I'm sure you can create ramdisks bigger than 4GB in such a system though, > and run many copies of big programs > > That's probably not a bad idea that, cache things like OpenOffice and Firefox in a ram disk and then run them from that. Maybe that'll increase the startup speed of OpenOffice a bit (although saying that, I installed Ubuntu on a P4 2.4GHz with 640MB Ram today and even with a lowish amount of memory it was still surprisingly snappy starting up OpenOffice). >> That's what I'm running on my laptop (Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit with the >> server kernel), it has 4GB Ram so I can squeeze out the extra 750MB out >> of it. Not sure if it makes a blind bit of difference most of the time >> but it does mean that I can fire up the odd couple of gig Virtual machines. >> >> I dare say though 1GB should be plenty for something that is just >> running as a squid cache. >> > > When I wur a lad... First squid cache I built probably didn't have more > than 64MB of RAM. I remember issues with RAM and some motherboards too - > early Pentiums (or was it late 486's!) had off-chip cache and although you > could add in more than 32,64,X RAM, you might find that only the first > 32MB got cached! > > Yep it's all moving so quickly. My first PC was a Cyrix 486slc33 with a massive 2MB Ram. I remember it well, memory was so expensive, something like £100 a meg, was around the time of the earthquake or something in Taiwan which bumped up the memory prices. I was a tad gutted as I didn't have enough memory to run Doom. I dare say 4GB in my notebook is overkill but it wasn't much difference in price so I figured I'd might as well stick in as much as it would take. > My AAO has 512MB of RAM and rarely swaps - but mainly because I don't run > enough on it to make it swap. My small PBXs have 256MB on-board, but 140MB > of that is taken up by the root filing system (ramdisk), leaving a mere > 116MB free for applications to use. I don't think my swap gets used that much, I only have about a 600MB swap partition (not fussed about hibernation mode, takes longer to hibernate than it does to do a fresh boot!). I do tend to have a lot of Firefox tabs open usually. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html