rbw wrote:
That's what I was thinking so the notebook models I am looking at are able to go to 4GB of RAM... I am also going to take a stab at no swap and see if that can eliminate that whole area of concern. That is also why I am wondering about the impact of CPU(s) and RAM increases to overall system performance (I do realize I'm asking for a stab at this question as opposed to an answer certain so any speculation is welcome).
Having a lot of physical memory is definitely important, but having an appropriately-sized swap file or device is equally important. Swapping is almost a necessity in a modern system. It's no longer a way to get stale pages out of memory, but in a lot of cases, a very important way to get contiguous blocks of free memory back. Memory fragmentation can be a big problem, no matter how much physical RAM you have. If you have 4GB of RAM, 2 GB "free", but the largest contiguous free region is 1MB, then you really only have 1MB of memory free. That's where swap comes in -- older pages are put into the swapfile and larger contiguous regions are freed.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have regarding this. :) -Kelsey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
