# Linux with a Gig of ram

## arkane

Has anyone ran Linux with a gig of ram?

Just wondering... I'm debating between 512 and a gig for an upgrade I'm going to be doing (full system upgrade)

I know what people are going to say, "go with the gig, it's cheap" but it's not... DDR ram is kinda pricey, relatively.  How well does Linux handle that memory, or KDE for that matter?  I'm running 384mb right now, and it's rediculous how much KDE uses of it...

If your running KDE, do you have a decent amount of resources left over to do other tasks with a gig?  I can't believe I'm asking this, considering how relatively large a gig was only 2 years ago.

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## tgnb

I got about a gig of RAM, most of it is only cached RAM. I run KDE and it is fine. Sometimes Mozilla leaks memory, but that can be fixed by restarting the app.

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## arkane

Cool... thanks for the input   :Very Happy: 

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## tsuru

I've been running 1 Gig ddr ram for about 7 months now with Gentoo.   I have no complaints thus far.  I believe there is a certain point when you don't need a 2 x MEM for your swap because at 1 gig I don't think I've seen my machine swap in linux ever.  Therefore I have about 100 mb swap right now just in case.  Just remember if you go for 1gig you need to enable the HIMEM option in the kernel.  

I briefly ran GNOME at the beginning of my Gentoo newbie stage but decided that both GNOME and KDE were too bulky for me/had too many bells and whistles that I didn't need and switched to XFce. I must say though one of my pet peeves about linux or maybe it's just top, I don't know, is the way memory is reported.   I don't know if you are basing your KDE frets off of top or actual "feel" but I frequently get reports that programs like mozilla is taking up 200 MB with 6 intances.  Initially I couldn't believe that moz would take up that much, and I was right, it was only really taking up the normal 30mb or so.  if a program has several intances going in the same address space top likes to add them together when they really are only taking up the space of one.

hope that helps in some way  :Neutral: 

--tsuru

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## friedmud

How do you know KDE is actually using So much RAM??

You know that you can't trust the numbers in "free" right??  You can't trust them because linux will leave an instance of every program you open in memory as long as it still has space (it will start dropping out the older ones when you need the memory for something else).  This is done so that programs start very quickly after the machine has been on for a couple of days (because if you have enough RAM everything is read out of RAM instead of off the HD).

I am personally running with 512MB of SDRAM and Linux never gets close to hitting swap (which is how you can tell your running out of memory).  Also note that I am running KDE with EVERYTHING turned on (and with 5 backgrounds - with unlimited cache, custom icons, liquid and everything else).

I think a Gig would be a huge waste.  You would never even hit a quarter of that in regular desktop usage.

Derek

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## Guest

i am in kde now with mozilla and konqueror open and of the 512mb of ram i have 412 or it is free....i dont think you need a gig unless your running a server otherwise you should put the money toward bettering your hardware maybe...if you need anything...but sounds to me like you have an app that is not letting go

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## Psychephylax

I concur...

A gig of ram is very unnecessary unless you're planning on running Oracle or hosting a high volume server.

Even windows doesn't need more than 400 megs of ram.

A better investment would be more hard drives or a bigger monitor. Everything looks better at 1600x1200  :Very Happy: 

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## illumin8

I've been running a gig of DDR PC-2100 in my Athlon XP1700 Server that runs Gentoo.  I've got about 10 MaxSQL databases on it, running InnoDB atomic transactions on MySQL, with PHP and Apache and Perl.  I love it because I can crank my InnoDB cache up to about half a gig and the database really flies.  It performs as good as Oracle and supports atomic transactions.

But you're right, for a desktop machine, a gig is a little bit overkill right now, but who knows, 6 months from now when KDE 6.0 is out, you might need it...  Seems to me the KDE user interface is getting more bloated than Windows now...  Looks nice though.

By the way, Gentoo makes a _great_ server.  Despite the bleeding edge hiccups every now and then, my server runs screamingly fast.  Much better than it would on Redhat or Mandrake, that's for sure.  Plus, Gentoo is a lot more like traditional Unix and conforms to the standard file locations better than most linux distros, so it's pretty nice.

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## JefP@@

Yow guys, I'm using kde3 on my amd k7 800 with 200 mbs of sdram (128mb + 64mb). I have no complaints about performance at all... (only dnetc is a little slower when there are a few proggies running  :Razz: , but that's not realy ram usage related) So I guess, you guys with 1Ghz of DDram should have no probs running kde etc. 

Grtz

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## ASCI Blue

T-bird 750, 384 megs, only prob I've ever had was with Xine's config getting cranky and using 99% of my CPU power to do everything. Quick del and restart fixed it.

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## vert

I'm running (actually compiling at this moment) kde3 with 768MB (Tbird 1300) and never saw it use SWAP. And usually I got quite some stuff running (for a desktop system at least  :Wink: ) So in my opinion a gig also is a bit of an overkill. Go for more storage or a bigger (second?) screen.

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