is 224mb ram enough?

[ph34r]

I just got off the phone ordering a second CPU for my system, and so I will shortly be running dual P2-350's. I already have 224mb - is this really sufficient? With X and everything loaded as it is now, I have LOTS of free physical ram available, and I never get into my 50mb swap file, so I guess I am asking "what more do I need to do now that I am going SMP?".

[bdg1983]

Recompile your kernel with SMP support?

Can't think of anything else as I've never used dual cpu's at home. Hope to one day.

[Molecule Man]

You are kinda like running 96megs of RAM in Win98. It can be done and usually won't be a performance hit but...

Over 256 would be a good amount. Recompiling your kernel for SMP. Depending on the program you might want to switch to one that has multi-threading support. If it does not havethat, it will only work on processor, but another program will use the other processor so it balances out.

[compunuts]

It really depends on what programs you are planning to run. Most distros now adays are turned to run with SMP support. You might want to recompile the kernel just the hell of it. Check the kernel messages when it boots up. If it's already SMP enable, then you don't need to recompile.
If you want a server with heavy database use or you will be doing a lot of multimedia stuff such as encoding MPEG and MP3s, then you might want to have more RAM.
My current desktop is P 233 with 64 MB of RAM. This website (http://www.svlug.org) used to run off of 486DX 66 with 96 MB of RAM and currently running off P 200 with 128 MB so go figure. We run about 6 websites, 8 mailing lists with full database support. Never been the problem and of course it runs off Debian with no X.

[ 02 March 2001: Message edited by: compunuts ]