T43-adding memory and effect

[burns334]

Can someone quantify the effect of doubling the RAM ie going from 512 to 1048. Is there a noticeable speed difference?

[Neil]

My first thought was to say, not enough difference that you would notice. But, it all depends on what you are doing and what kind of speed you are looking to improve.

What RAM related problem are you having? What kind of improvement are you looking for?

[burns334]

Neil, I have several T43s and notice that the one with the 1048 is almost twice as fast loading pages and wondered if it was all RAM related.

[Neil]

Are you talking about loading web pages? More RAM will only help there if those pages are already cached in RAM. If there is insufficient RAM, the cache will be in the Windows page file (if you are using Windows), which is slower than RAM, but not so much so that most users would notice. The amount of RAM shouldn't have any affect on loading a new web page that you have not visited before.

This is one of the reasons I asked. Folks often as me if more RAM will make their internet faster, and technically the answer is no. But the are instances where it might seem that it does.

Of course, this is just all my opinion/experience, and someone else will likely come along with a completely different store, so...YMMV.

[burns334]

Well Neil I'm just wondering why 2 identical machines should be so different, I've ordered some extra ram, lets see what happens. Is there something else I should look for?

[Orclas]

From 512 to 1048 on any machine from XP and on makes for a computer feeling faster in my experience. I assume it's mostly due to less caching and given the peanuts it costs, it's a no brainer.

[ajkula66]

At today's prices of DDR2 laptop RAM, there's really no reason not to have a T43/p or R52 maxed out at 2GB...

[burns334]

Well I added 2gb (first one received) to my T60 and it sure snaps from one page to another now, waiting for T43 RAM.

Edit. It wakes up from hibernation almost immediately now, very very different.

[Orclas]

Well I added 2gb (first one received) to my T60 and it sure snaps from one page to another now, waiting for T43 RAM

There you go!

[Neil]

You know, I don't doubt that you are seeing the speed increase you are reporting, but I just can't seem to wrap my mind around what would make it so.

The T43 I'm sitting in front of right now has 2GB on RAM...OK...running Firefox on LMDE with 5 tabs open, and system monitor shows 314MB of RAM used (and 0 swap, BTW). Now would I see a performance slowdown if I only had 512MB RAM instead of 2GB? I dunno...but I don't understand why I would.

Anyway, what George wrote above is good advice. More RAM certainly doesn't hurt anything, and helps in a lot of areas. I would just like to see... I dunno....something a little more logical, or empirical that explains why it would feel like web pages load faster with more RAM. This is not an arguement, just trying to promote further discussion that might lead to my learning something.

[burns334]

Neil, I like to see real reasons also, but I am going to have 2 identical T43's with different amounts of RAM running side by side and I'll let you know my impressions very soon.

[Orclas]

As said, it's not 512MB to 2GB that's key, it's the 512MB+. The rest is pretty much about "why not spend another 10 bucks while at it?".

I'm currently running nothing but one FF tab, a light weight VPN client and the system (including AV) and Process Explorer reports some 510MB used physical memory. That would be a mere 2MB free RAM, which will sooner or later necessitate disk swapping and slow things down. I've sat at many XP machines with 512MB and many with 1GB and there's a clear difference (on similar systems).

That being said, I don't think I've ever seen my 1.5GB T40 report even a full GB used.

[Neil]

It's not hard to understand how running processes that are using 512MB of RAM, or even just close to it, would perform better with 1GB plus RAM that with 512MB, but the thing I'm having trouble with is the feeling that web pages (with no other kind of application running) load faster with more RAM available. Again, I'm not saying it isn't so, I'm just asking for numbers and reasons why the perception is so common.

[ajkula66]

(snip) ...but the thing I'm having trouble with is the feeling that web pages (with no other kind of application running) load faster with more RAM available.

I think that the "no other kind of application" bit might very well be the key here...many people are (at least partially) unaware of what happens in the background.

I'm on my wife's modded T43p right now (2GB RAM running XP Pro), have about 35 Kmeleon tabs open, 60 processes running, and I'm dipping into the paging file for a full 1GB, although the physical RAM itself is only 55% used...if this were my machine, the setup would be vastly different, but it's not...

So the setup itself, including the background processes, might hold the answer to your question, Neil...although I'm by no stretch of imagination stating that it actually does...