War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed
I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca. Dead deal: <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/costco-ca-hot-299-99-hp-15-6-touchscreen-laptop-intel-core-i3-1215u-8gb-ram-256gb-ssd-2673529/> Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM. Only one was occupied. It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM. - two stick should perform better: allow dual-channel memory access - many consider 8 GiB too little RAM these days. I'm not sure that's true but more cannot hurt I bought another 8 GiB stick with the same specs from Amazon for $25.99 and installed it. <https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08P3KJRM5> I ran passmark benchmarking software before and after the upgrade <https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=202729010710> <https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=202835509345> The Passmark Rating (whatever that is) went up about 20%. You can see that the laptop still has modest performance. I'm glad the HP included one 8 GiB stick instead of two 4 GiB sticks. That made it cheap for me to upgrade (add one stick instead of replacing two) but it made the off-the-shelf performance worse.
On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 02:52:38 -0500 (EST) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca. Dead deal: <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/costco-ca-hot-299-99-hp-15-6-touchscreen-laptop-intel-core-i3-1215u-8gb-ram-256gb-ssd-2673529/>
Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM. Only one was occupied. It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM.
Hugh, I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For | GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum. What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB? For me, it is Firefox with a lot of tabs. I'm sure that some web pages are way more RAM-intensive than others (see about:performance) but I rarely pick pages based on weight. I admit that I keep way too many tabs open but mostly on my desktop which has 24 GiB of RAM. I regularly run Fedora / GNOME desktop on 4 G machines. They work but are not fast, for multiple reasons. They have Atom-microarchitecture processors and eMMC "disks", both of which slow them down. On the plus side, they are delightfully inexpensive, small, energy efficient, and silent. I have several notebooks, of varying ages, with 8 GiB of RAM. They all work fine. RAM is cheap enough to overbuy, except when you are forced to buy it with the computer. Manufacturers really pad the price of computers with more RAM. Most notebooks now come with soldered RAM, not socketed. Some notebooks come with soldered RAM plus an empty or occupied socket. That's not as good as two sockets. Best performance, all other things being equal, is to have the same RAM size in the socket and soldered. Any variation comes at a cost. One reason I bought this particular cheap notebook is that it came with a perfect memory configuration for upgrading to 16 GiB. A certain amount of RAM is tied up in fixed overhead assignments: the kernel, the memory used by the iGPU, the memory used by NVMe drives. So doubling RAM makes more than twice as much RAM available for applications. In this particular case, adding RAM added RAM bandwidth, improving the speed of computation.
On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For | GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.
What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?
Hughk I probably spend too much time on YouTube. I use GIMP to mess with photographs. I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document formats. -- Howard Gibson hgibson@eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 05:18:13PM -0500, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For | GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.
What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?
Hughk
I probably spend too much time on YouTube. I use GIMP to mess with photographs. I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document formats.
I'm using a lenovo x240 with 8GB of RAM for pretty much the same type of usage. This is actually my second x240. When the first one crapped out I resorted to using a Pentium (MS Vista era, not a modern core called pentium) with 3GB of RAM while hunting for a replacement. The default install on the Pentium created a ridiculously small SWAP space which caused problems, but once I increased it, it ran quite nicely if a bit slow compared to the x240. -- joeDoe
| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST) | "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: | > What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB? | I probably spend too much time on YouTube. I use GIMP to mess with | photographs. I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am | sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document | formats. Thanks for the reply. We do some of those things on 8 GiB. Which of those tasks actually pinch when you run them on an 8 GiB system?
Howard Gibson wrote:
I probably spend too much time on YouTube. I use GIMP to mess with photographs. I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document formats. -- Howard Gibson
My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB. Mostly I'm messing with GIMP on smallish pictures, about 1000 pixels square. Just now GIMP has about a dozen of these open. Plus two dozen instances of an Image Viewer program that I concocted with Python and PIL, and 3 or 4 pcmanfm windows with thumbnails of up to a couple thousand of these pictures each. `top` says that swap is full (100MiB), but there's 1.2 GiB of memory available. GIMP that came with Raspberry Pi OS is not wonderfully stable -- might crash once a day on average. Doesn't seem directly due to memory shortage though. Console messages from one time that I ran it from the command line hinted that there might be mutual exclusion problems with GtK, or something.
| From: mwilson--- via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB. Neat! | `top` says that swap is full (100MiB), but there's 1.2 GiB of memory | available. I'd be tempted to add swap. But then again, if that is on an SD card, maybe not. I don't know the kernel policies. Or rather, I know a lot of different kernels' policies. So this will be unreliable. 1. Paging policies tend to migrate pages that haven't been used recently, but must be preserved, to swap. Code pages don't need to be written to swap because they are immutable -- they can be reloaded from the original file. 2. If there is no memory pressure (i.e. more RAM than things to occupy it), probably nothing goes to swap. 3. It used to be that RAM was used for processes: code and data. For a few decades, files have been allowed to fill up available RAM but could be easily evicted to their place in the filesystem when memory pressure got high. Eviction often requires no I/O: if the file was only being read. Consequence: RAM may all be used but since things can be evicted there is room for more stuff: you haven't run out. 4. In the last couple of years a new level of swap has been created: compressed swap stored in a RAM-disk. This sounds crazy but makes sense if the stuff being swapped is significantly compressable. And if writing to swap is slow (eg. SD card) So: Your swap being full may mean that some stuff is stranded in RAM even though it isn't used much. Your RAM having 1.2 GiB available does not actually indicate that RAM is tight. Much of the occupied space might be evictable files. If you were truly short of RAM + swap, I think you would see OOM messages in the log. | GIMP that came with Raspberry Pi OS is not wonderfully stable -- might | crash once a day on average. Doesn't seem directly due to memory shortage | though. Console messages from one time that I ran it from the command | line hinted that there might be mutual exclusion problems with GtK, or | something. Are you running it from GDB? In theory that might help you figure out what's going on. But GDB would like to to install the symbols for executables that you care about and that may overwhelm your SD card.
On 2024-02-20 02:12, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
Your RAM having 1.2 GiB available does not actually indicate that RAM is tight. Much of the occupied space might be evictable files.
If you were truly short of RAM + swap, I think you would see OOM messages in the log.
I used to look at writes to the swap device as an indicator of how much I needed to reclaim memory. There will always be a certain amount but when it takes a step upwards at the time I added load, then I'm low on available memory. I have the numbers for Solaris around somewhere, but it was the sudden jump that tended to tip me off. --dave
William Park wrote:
On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB. ...
I don't believe you. What do you use for main disk? I tried doing this with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up with all the hassles.
Ok. But that's what I'm using. The main drive is a 128GB SD chip with the software, the home directories and the ordinary working data, small development projects and things. BUT the big directories with pictures and what-not that I mentioned are on a 2TB Western Digital USB drive. No hassles that I've found, except that the Raspberry Pi foundation can lag behind the state-of-the-art in applications. I was moaning here before about failing to get .avif graphic support compiled. That's only just arrived in ImageMagick in Debian 12 on the laptop. So working with .avif files means a lot of rsync'ing and ssh'ing and messing around.
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On the swap usage: There's a parameter (swappiness, on /proc/sys/vm/swappiness or vm.swappiness on /etc/sysctl.conf) that tells the kernel how aggressively to swap. A value of 100 will swap as much as possible until the swap file is full, while 0 will never ever swap, even if there's space and OOP killer started gunning processes down because of lack of memory. That changed some kernel versions ago, before the change a 0 would only swap when memory was exhausted, and now a 0 means never ever swap no matter what. I was left trying to figure out why OOP was killing processes when the swap file was empty. On virtual servers I usually keep swappiness at 1, so it won't swap unless there's real need, and on desktops I keep at 85 to free up memory for the file cache. On a RasPi with sdcard storage, I would keep it close to 10, because it's better on the SD to read than to write... Mauro https://www.maurosouza.com - registered Linux User: 294521 Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God. On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 9:24 AM William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB. ...
I don't believe you. What do you use for main disk? I tried doing this with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up with all the hassles.
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On Wed, 21 Feb 2024 at 07:24, William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB. ...
I don't believe you. What do you use for main disk? I tried doing this with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up with all the hassles.
Please don't do this. This list survives because people willingly read it - publically doubting other people, who you have no idea about, makes this list much less useful or welcoming. Other people, faced with the same trade-offs that any of us face, will make different choices. If you want to know about how and why someone uses a Raspberry Pi for a desktop, ask a question - ask 6! But, please, consider that you are broadcasting your judgement to a whole list, and that other people may take that as hostile and simply go somewhere else. "Be curious, not judgemental." Thanks.
On 2024-02-19 10:32, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 02:52:38 -0500 (EST) "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca. Dead deal: <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/costco-ca-hot-299-99-hp-15-6-touchscreen-laptop-intel-core-i3-1215u-8gb-ram-256gb-ssd-2673529/>
Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM. Only one was occupied. It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM.
Hugh,
I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.
My travel laptop has only 4gb ram and is very very nimble. My wife winds up loading at least 4 firefox tabs with google maps and as many media rich tabs of museums or other attractions. I was even prepared to use xfce on it but it runs KDE 5 perfectly fine. Hugh pointed it out last year, a cheap chromebook at Best Buy for $99.99, a lenovo ideapad 3 11" chromebook, celeron-n4020 64gb emmc, 4gb-ram It is very light. It started out life as a chromebook until I corebooted it and now run Debian testing on a crypted file system. I would be annoyed if was stolen or lost, but at $99 I wouldn't be crying. The only issue I have with it is that I have never been able to get the internal sound card working, I'm using a DAC instead. PS: I ran linux on chromeos for a while but was unhappy with a) the two OS maintenance, b) the trouble getting a VPN up to the mother ship and c) not being able to crypt the box and d) the inconvenience. -- Michael Galea
participants (9)
-
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
David Collier-Brown -
Howard Gibson -
joeDoe -
Mauro Souza -
Michael Galea -
mwilson＠Vex.Net -
William Park -
William Witteman