Amount of RAM?

mrmylanman

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 13, 2008
Messages
1,484
Hey all,

I have a Xeon E3-1230 and it is a great CPU so far. No overclocking unfortunately but it is pushing out a 6900 WU in just about 2 days spot on, (second WU on it, I don't remember the other one, but the time was around the same).

This is around the same as my overclocked i7-920, while creating a lot less heat so I'm happy.

However, this computer has 4GB of RAM. Is that limiting my times any? I'm using Ubuntu, but will move on to Arch when I get the free time to do so, which will cut down on overhead somewhat, and there are better kernels available for Arch which might speed things up as well.

The "system monitor" says only 2.6GB are being used, and I indicated all the RAM as available to it, but I remember back in the day someone said you really want to have at least 6GB if possible for folding bigadv units, so I'm not sure if that applies or not.

Any clarification would be great! Thanks
 
4 GB is plenty. I am actually surprised you are using that much. Back when i had some 8 thread boxes, I seem to recall memory usage just over 1 GB using native Linux.

The 6 GB figure came from the "old" days when bigadv was Linux-only and the client used around 4 GB. With a tri-channel X58 system, you were stuck with 3 x 1 GB or 3 x 2 GB. 3 x 1 GB just wasn't enough to run bigadv.
 
I gotcha. Ubuntu is kinda bloaty from my experience, but I am using an SSD (which means I should be using GPT) and my motherboard has EFI not BIOS, so GRUB2 is a pain to manually configure (which is what I'd need to do with Arch I think). I've been too lazy to do that. Usage should go down once I do.

Thanks!
 
Most of the memory use you see is for disk caching... If applications want more memory they just take it back from the disk cache. I wouldn't worry too much about memory usage until you're paging to the swap area. Linux and Unix in general will tend to use all of the memory you can throw at it to make the system faster.
 
Yeah I'm pretty familiar with Linux, it's been my primary OS for about 7 or 8 years now. I wasn't sure if F@H could use more RAM if it was available.

Thanks though!

:cool:
 
fah loves to use FASTER ram rather than more ram ... :D ...
 
I gotcha cool. I wasn't 100% on that aspect of Sandy Bridge. I know on my 920 I had to increase the BCLK but on Sandy Bridge I guess you can't really do that.
 
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