On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 9:08 AM, J. C. O'Connell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> look at the ram data in the task manager Yes. Also, listen for heavy swapping activity. Windows, Linux, Mac OS and many others support virutal memory, making apparently available RAM larger than actual RAM by putting parts of the "memory" on disk. This usually works well quite well, but can also be highly problematic. There's a quote attributed to Seymour Cray, "Memory is like orgasm. You can fake it, but it is better if you don't have to". The classic disaster is thrashing. Not enough RAM, so almost every page you want has to be brought in from disk first, and almost every time there's no free RAM so you have to move something else out before you can move the data in. The processor has to wait for this. Disk access times are measured in milliseconds, while RAM speed is in nanoseconds. The speed difference is at least 10,000 to 1, so the performance hit if you get thrashing is enormous. Typically, you see your screen frozen while the disk churns madly. If you see that behaviour, you very definitely need more RAM and the gain from adding it is likely to be night and day. Short of that, if you hear a lot of disk activity for no obvious reason and the task manager shows a fair bit of virtual memory use, it is likely worth adding RAM. You'll get a small performance gain, and lower the risk of ever getting into thrashing. -- Sandy Harris, Nanjing, China -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
