Box from Newegg arrived this morning. Oh, goody! Unpack 2x 2GByte Corsair RAM modules. Plug into workstation, on top of the 2 x 1GByte modules that were already in there. Reboot. BIOS sees 6G. Linux sees 2.7G. Er...
OK, rebuild the kernel with the "more than 4G of physical memory" option set and reboot again. Re-install the Nvidia driver to go with it. And...
Yep. Six flippin' gigabytes of RAM.
Well, I tend to leave the system running for months at a time, with many programs spread across 14 virtual desktops, and some of those (Firefox, Acrobat, and such) are cumulative memory hogs. And here I am getting ready to route some fine-pitch, multi-layer boards with EAGLE, which gets memory-hungry in a hurry when you start using a 0.001" grid for the autorouter.
And, after all, the extra 4 gig cost me less than I paid for my first kilobyte of RAM, back in the day. (Eight 2102s, at many dollars each - I had to mow a lot of lawns to pay for that.)
Now to see how long it takes for this system to go into paging again....
Update: well, after a busy afternoon, memory usage stands at 2.2G, so it would have been paging by now without the upgrade. (And the screen-blanker is the first thing to get paged out, and it doesn't get paged back in, so once paging starts, my monitor stays lit up unless I turn it off manually.)
Far out. I've been out of the computer hardware loop for a couple of years. I didn't even know 2G modules existed. Mind you, I'm on the trailing edge of technology so by the time I see them they'll be way out of date. A bit like me.
Posted by: Roger from Solar Power Facts | Tuesday, 30 June 2009 at 23:40