How much memory do you have?

[DimGR]

i was wondering how much memory your pc has? What is the ideal amount of ram for linux?

i have 768 mb rdram rambus

[Dark Ninja]

Haha...you are MORE than fine -- even if you run memory hogs like KDE and/or Gnome. My PC is running with 256MB and a 1GB swap file (even though it is probably completely unnecessary -- but, oh well).

I know some regulars on the board are running machines off of machines that have less than 64MB. You definitely are good to go.

[canon006]

Ha, I've got the same in my older Dell machine 768MB of PC800 RDRAM. In my more current homebuilt Athlon system I have 512MB of PC2700 DDR. Once my budget allows for it I want to upgrade to a 1GB matched pair so that it can run in dual channel.

As for the optimal amount of memory, I would think that it's as much as you can afford :).

[JohnT]

The question should be what is ideal for your situation. I do some graphics and only have about half as much as you and it seems to be enough for me.

[DimGR]

i recently upgraded to 768 from 256:) :)
having 4 virtual dekstops open all the time full with memory eater applications ( like superkaramba etc) made my system kinda slow sometimes

[AdamZ]

I've got 128MB, 128MB swap, running gnome. You are most certainly fine.

[Loki3]

512Mb with 512MB swap

Seems fine even under Mandrake and KDE.

[hard candy]

It's funny, I have 1024 MB physical RAM, but I just noticed KDE Sysguard and Sysmonitor only show 1010 MB. What happened to the other 14MB ?
TOP shows
Mem: 1034736k av, 697020k used, 337716k free, 0k shrd, 91568k buff
433856k active, 206336k inactive
Swap: 979956k av, 0k used, 979956k free 348984k cached
All this memory and I still can't remember to pick up milk on the way home. :(

[madcompnerd]

Machine 1:
Athlon 1800
512 PC-2700, 1GB Swap

Machine2:
700 Celeron
192 PC-100, 400MB Swap

Machine3:
350 PII
256 PC-133 (clocked down), 256MB Swap

Machine4:
Cyrix 224MHz
128 EDO, 128MB Swap

Machine 5:
iMac G3 (233)
32 RAM, not yet setup

[bs_texas]

Originally posted by hard candy
What happened to the other 14MB?

Isn't that probably related to the age old problem of using metric terms for size descriptions instead of powers of 2? A meg being considered 1,000,000 rather that 2^20=1,048,576 or in binary
100000000000000000000, or simpler thinking,
1k = 1000 rather than 1k = 1024

I think I'm getting a headache now. ;)

[ph34r]

My server has 32 mb ram (just upped to a p75 too! used to be a 486 wtih 12mb ram), my home desktop has 512mb (need 3.5gb more to fill it) and at work my desktop has 512mb as well. I've got a laptop (p133) that has 32mb ram as well.

Basically, as long as you aren't using swap while doing what you typically do, then you have enough ram.

[sharth]

Originally posted by hard candy
It's funny, I have 1024 MB physical RAM, but I just noticed KDE Sysguard and Sysmonitor only show 1010 MB. What happened to the other 14MB ?
TOP shows
Mem: 1034736k av, 697020k used, 337716k free, 0k shrd, 91568k buff
433856k active, 206336k inactive
Swap: 979956k av, 0k used, 979956k free 348984k cached
All this memory and I still can't remember to pick up milk on the way home. :( kernel resident stuff probably. check dmesg? or maybe its the 1024 v 1000 issue.

[sploo22]

256MB RAM (64MB used for integrated video) + 500MB swap. It gets kinda thrashy with Gnome/Firefox/Apache/MySQL/GIMP/MPlayer/kernel compile all running at once, but hey, it works. :p

[rbrimhall]

759 RAM
2 GB Swap (whew! I was going to set up software suspend at some point... I don't think I've used any swap so far with this install...)

[gehidore]

1GB

[AndrewLubinus89]

I only have the defautl 256 meg with 64 dedicated for video card :( I have 1 gig of swap. I have so much swap because I used to have a small slackware partition there.
I use ion wm instead of kde or gnome though so it isn't too bad.

[tom56]

256mb with 512mb swap

[hard candy]

kernel resident stuff probably. check dmesg? or maybe its the 1024 v 1000 issue.
Jun 3 17:33:19 boogienights kernel: Memory: 1034020k/1048512k available (3546k kernel code, 13584k reserved, 1198k data, 196k init, 131008k highmem)
It looks like it's reserved.

[rocketpcguy]

32MB RAM with 16 shared VGA. oh wait, that's my roommate's PC.

256

[AndrewLubinus89]

Originally posted by rocketpcguy
32MB RAM with 16 shared VGA. oh wait, that's my roommate's PC.

256
And you didn't notice the difference from yours?? I think your pc could use some tweaking ;)

[MartinB]

768MB + 512MB Swap in my Gentoo Athlon XP 1800 Desktop
256MB (-32MB shared video) + 512MB Swap in my Gentoo Athlon XP 1800 Laptop
224MB in my Windows 98SE K6-2 350MHz
32MB + ?MB Swap in my SmoothWall 2.0 Pentium 200MHz

Full specs in sig link. :)

[dr_te_z]

The answer is ..... O, forgot the question .... I'm so short of memory :)

Okay serious:

My P200 only has 64Mb. Not too much but I only use that machine to fiddle around with multiple linux/bsd/os2 instances.

My boss provided my with a laptop with 512 Mb and XP installed. I also installed SuSE8.2 (dual-boot) and that runs smoothly.

[Uranus]

I have 512 M's of true RAM, and 20 Gigs of SWAP.
(This is because I often try out distributions, and once I uninstall one and leave some open space I make it swap so it at least has some use) :D
There will soon be little stuff left though (I _really_ want to get FreeBSD to work, and still want to try Debian)

Sam

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by hard candy
Jun 3 17:33:19 boogienights kernel: Memory: 1034020k/1048512k available (3546k kernel code, 13584k reserved, 1198k data, 196k init, 131008k highmem)
It looks like it's reserved. I assume you have CONFIG_HIGHMEM_4GB turned on in your kernel then? If not, turn it on, and you should be able to use those extra few megs.

As for my machine, 768MB of RAM and 384MB of swap (the huge swap partition is left over from when I only had 256MB; I never need more than ~20MB of it anymore).

[knute]

384MB

Now the question of the day is whether or not you told the kernel how much memory you have in your system at bootup! :D

[hard candy]

I assume you have CONFIG_HIGHMEM_4GB turned on in your kernel then? If not, turn it on, and you should be able to use those extra few megs.
Yep, it's turned on.
Now my laptop has 512 and it shows it as being free, with no reserve. Both machines are running Slack current with the 2.6.6 kernel. So I get to play now and find out why the desktop is holding out on me! I REALLY need those 14 MB. :)
TOP on laptop:
Mem: 514316k av, 311288k used, 203028k free, 0k shrd, 43548k buff
200300k active, 83452k inactive
Swap: 939792k av, 0k used, 939792k free 143748k cached

[Legithrandil]

i've got 256mb with 512mb swap.
when the only things running are fluxbox, gkrellm, and gaim, i average a total of about 40mb of memory+swap used.

that's good, right?

[mdwatts]

1GB - Main PC (dual AMD 1800 MP's)

768mb - Backup Desktop (AMD 1300)

512mb - Compaq Presario Laptop (P4-2.4)

384mb - Compaq Armada Laptop (PIII-750)

256mb - (Compaq Deskpro 6000 (PPro-200) Not used now

[VoiDeR]

P233 Dell Inspiron 3000 with 144mb with 512mb swap. It can do anything my old desktop could (amd 1700+) Even run full mpg movies with out missing a beat. How do you tell if your swap is being accessed?

VoiDeR

[JohnT]

Originally posted by VoiDeR
P233 Dell Inspiron 3000 with 144mb with 512mb swap. It can do anything my old desktop could (amd 1700+) Even run full mpg movies with out missing a beat. How do you tell if your swap is being accessed?

VoiDeR You can run "top", or an app like gkrellm just name a couple.

[DSwain]

512mb DDR PC2100 w/1GB Swap

It's magical fun!

[sharth]

Originally posted by VoiDeR
P233 Dell Inspiron 3000 with 144mb with 512mb swap. It can do anything my old desktop could (amd 1700+) Even run full mpg movies with out missing a beat. How do you tell if your swap is being accessed?

VoiDeR free -m will show the memory usage in megabytes.

[Syngin]

Originally posted by hard candy
It's funny, I have 1024 MB physical RAM, but I just noticed KDE Sysguard and Sysmonitor only show 1010 MB. What happened to the other 14MB ?
TOP shows
Mem: 1034736k av, 697020k used, 337716k free, 0k shrd, 91568k buff
433856k active, 206336k inactive
Swap: 979956k av, 0k used, 979956k free 348984k cached
All this memory and I still can't remember to pick up milk on the way home. :(

On board hardware like video and sound share memory don't they?

[x_Ray]

1GB

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Syngin
On board hardware like video and sound share memory don't they? Sound does not (there isn't normally any memory on a sound card, so why would it need memory when it's onboard? ;)).

Video, on the other hand, depends on which motherboard it is. Some motherboards (especially the ones with onboard Riva128 hardware or comparably-aged video cards) do have separate VRAM chips for the video card. Most recent AGP onboard video cards, though, do seem to share system memory. So that could be it.

[serz]

256mb on my desktop and 64mb on my server.