Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com> wrote:
There's no need to "guess andbenchmark" because the kernel is already managing this for you.
A great way to utilize RAM is to run several VMs :) Also I wonder what is your chipset/RAM type, because on a typical desktop board with modern CPU and RAM modules, your memory size should be even for the optimal (dual-channel) performance. Or is your video memory shared?
AMD A6-5400K APU DIMM DDR3 Synchronous, 2x8Gs I didn't see an option in my bios for shared memory so im assuming it's not, or that I'm blind
It all depends on your usage pattern.
I've installed a system monitor and I've found that the only time my disk io is high is when i'm running deluged. Would my torrents dir be a good candidate for tmpfs? It's rather larger than my torrents dir but is it possible to have the most intensive torrents put into it? Or is this unneccesary?
One procedure which really benefits from being done in RAM is building packages, especially large ones like gcc, glibc or qemu.
In some circumstances, you'd want to store systemd journal and/or part of syslog log files in RAM. For example, HostAP (wireless authentication) daemon can log a lot. As a result, the journal grows dozens of MiB a day which quickly makes reading it off the disk rather painful. Since the journal cannot be fine tuned, I usually configure it to be volatile, and also tell syslog to write hostapd-related messages to e.g. /tmp/log/hostapd.log.
I've put in ~/src/<specific-dirs> but logging doesn't apply to me.
For a regular desktop, people put in RAM ~/.mozilla, ~/.local/chromium (or whatever Chrome uses these days), etc. However, in my experience the resulting speedup is next to none and not worth the risk of data loss in case of a power failure or a system freeze...
I've installed profile-sync-daemon. I haven't noticed any improvement yet but I will keep using it for a month or so
The truth is that on desktop machine which does not do virtualization, you don't need more than 2GiB or RAM. Remember, memory modules do consume power so it may be sensible to remove most of them.
Interesting, I've always thought the more ram the better :P Thanks for your input guys.