I upgraded RAM. Should I increase swap?

[Flame]

On one of my laptops which is now pretty old, but use it for from time to time for various stuff. i increased the RAM from 1gb to 3gb(adding 2gb to the extra slot)

its running Lubuntu, the swap size is 952.00 mb

I dont know if i would gain anything by increasing my swap.


Should I increase the swap? or keep as it is..

 

[nero99]

Never run 3gb of ram! Ram is supposed to be used in pairs of 2. Ditch the 1gb stick and get a second 2gb.

 

[VinsCool]

Never run 3gb of ram! Dam is supposed to be used in pairs of 2. Ditch the 1gb stick and get a second 2gb.

I've been on 3gb for years on my old latop, and it worked fine. So is this THAT bad?

 

[jDSX]

Why no get a whole 4gb stick instead of x1 1gb and 1x 2 sticks?

 

[Flame]

Never run 3gb of ram! Ram is supposed to be used in pairs of 2. Ditch the 1gb stick and get a second 2gb.

wait what!

will do

Why no get a whole 4gb stick instead of x1 1gb and 1x 2 sticks?

but its a 32 bit processor... and the laptop runs 32bit OSes. my windows partition will only see 3.5gb?


aka

i was being a cheap skate


plus one of them was empty, and got 2gb.

 

[jDSX]

wait what!

will do




but its a 32 bit processor... and the laptop runs 32bit OSes. my windows partition will only see 3.5gb?

As long as you don't go over 4gb limit you should be fine.

 

[Flame]

now i think about it i remember something like this; about the ram.

i use a chromebook. and my pc uses two 4gb.



but what about the swap!

 

[nl255]

If you plan to use suspend/hibernate then your swap needs to be 1.5-2x your ram because it uses your swap partition(s) to store the ram dump. Otherwise it is not necessary as the 2x your ram came from the early Unix days where data could only be swapped out to the same memory address/file position in swap, so say you had 10MB of ram and had data to swap out the data between 5-6MB in ram, it had to be copied to either 5-6MB or 15-16MB in swap. Fortunately that is no longer the case in any modern un*x system.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

As long as you don't go over 4gb limit you should be fine.

The 4GB limit doesn't apply to Linux in most cases thanks to PAE, though the per process limit of 2-3GB (depending on kernel configuration) still applies.

 

[nolimits59]

Never run 3gb of ram! Ram is supposed to be used in pairs of 2. Ditch the 1gb stick and get a second 2gb.

this is dumb on so many levels...

@Flame you can keep your 1+2 ram stick, there is nothing wrong with that, just make sur the speed is not dragging down the other stick, like one is 800 and the other one 1333 if it's DDR3 for exemple.

about the SWAP, yeah, a little more of SWAP should be great if you have space to spare for it? 1.5x OR 2x is recommended for more than 1gb of RAM, you can put like 4-5gb of RAM, that's gonna be great .

 

[The Real Jdbye]

this is dumb on so many levels...

@Flame you can keep your 1+2 ram stick, there is nothing wrong with that, just make sur the speed is not dragging down the other stick, like one is 800 and the other one 1333 if it's DDR3 for exemple.

about the SWAP, yeah, a little more of SWAP should be great if you have space to spare for it? 1.5x OR 2x is recommended for more than 1gb of RAM, you can put like 4-5gb of RAM, that's gonna be great .

Actually, from what I have read in research I have done in the past, if you use two RAM sticks that are different, the RAM will be dropped down to single channel mode, instead of dual channel which is faster (assuming his laptop supports dual channel RAM in the first place, I'm not sure if that's normal on laptops)
So it is indeed preferrable to use two identical RAM sticks.

 

[migles]

this is dumb on so many levels...

@Flame you can keep your 1+2 ram stick, there is nothing wrong with that, just make sur the speed is not dragging down the other stick, like one is 800 and the other one 1333 if it's DDR3 for exemple.

about the SWAP, yeah, a little more of SWAP should be great if you have space to spare for it? 1.5x OR 2x is recommended for more than 1gb of RAM, you can put like 4-5gb of RAM, that's gonna be great .

i had a 2+1+1 setup, ddr2, and i think one chip has a higher frequency than the other.. but it is a minimal difference..
never got real issues..

 

[nolimits59]

Actually, from what I have read in research I have done in the past, if you use two RAM sticks that are different, the RAM will be dropped down to single channel mode, instead of dual channel which is faster (assuming his laptop supports dual channel RAM in the first place, I'm not sure if that's normal on laptops)
So it is indeed preferrable to use two identical RAM sticks.

it's "just" need to have the same chips IIRC no ? like if is 1GB is 256*4 and the 2GB is 256*8 it's gonna be dual-channel, but for what i remember, dual channel is not that "big deal", better have "plenty" of RAM with a abordable speed than low ram with 15% faster RAM...
Don't misunderstand me, dual channel is important if you do rendering and all that stuff, but at this level of RAM, 15% of ram speed is not important.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

it's "just" need to have the same chips IIRC no ? like if is 1GB is 256*4 and the 2GB is 256*8 it's gonna be dual-channel, but for what i remember, dual channel is not that "big deal", better have "plenty" of RAM with a abordable speed than low ram with 15% faster RAM...
Don't misunderstand me, dual channel is important if you do rendering and all that stuff, but at this level of RAM, 15% of ram speed is not important.

It would bug me to know I'm not getting the most out of my hardware due to a weird/improper setup. That might just be me though.

 

[nl255]

It would bug me to know I'm not getting the most out of my hardware due to a weird/improper setup. That might just be me though.

However 2GB of ram and 1GB of swap will always be slower than 3GB of ram, even if having 3GB drops it down to single channel.

 

[nolimits59]

It would bug me to know I'm not getting the most out of my hardware due to a weird/improper setup. That might just be me though.

it's already "improper" to have 1-2-3 gb of ram for a desktop computer nowadays, the big minimum is realy 4GB to enjoy a confortable use, even with a ubuntu, okay you can run this on very very low end specs like 512mb of RAM and 32gb of HD, but even the Q6600 4GB ram and 256gb HD Ubuntu i have struggle on some "simple" task, if you surf on like 5 to 10 pages at the same time, chromium/firefox/vivaldi gonna take 500 to 2gb of ram... but this is not a improper way to get your computer to work, just an other way.
It's like saying that it's improper to use a HD because you COULD buy a SSD fore like 100% more perfomance (mostly on linux distrib, the gain is amazing, like on win10), no, if you don't have this and you want to use just the parts you have, well it's not improper.

But defo, if the OP, CAN, buy a 4gb stick, or a 2GB, that would be better ^^, there is no reason to argue that .

 

[FireEmblemGuy]

A swap increase isn't strictly necessary, but if it's not going to eat up too much HDD space it couldn't hurt.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a 1+2GB setup. Yes, you'll lose out on dual-channel benefits, but for everyday use it's no big deal. The first laptop I could personally claim to own shipped from the factory with 3GB in the waning days of DDR2 and Vista.

Actually, assuming your laptop is using DDR2 (I can't imagine much shipping with 1GB of DDR3), I could probably send you another 2GB stick for $6-7 shipped if you're in the US, although I have no idea if the voltage/timing would be the same.

It's worth noting that if your processor supports PAE, 32-bit Ubuntu (and, I would assume, Lubuntu) supports up to 64GB of RAM, although I doubt your chipset actually could support more than 4GB max; regardless it means (in a general case of your CPU not sucking) that you could upgrade to 2x2GB and not worry about any of that last gig going to waste.

 

[BurningDesire]

Never run 3gb of ram! Ram is supposed to be used in pairs of 2. Ditch the 1gb stick and get a second 2gb.

Based on my own curiosity. Why?

 

[k3rizz3k]

@Flame As for the question everyone is ignoring. Increasing ram generally Decreases swap usage, so no need to enlarge the swap file.

 

[Joom]

about the SWAP, yeah, a little more of SWAP should be great if you have space to spare for it? 1.5x OR 2x is recommended for more than 1gb of RAM, you can put like 4-5gb of RAM, that's gonna be great .

Shouldn't even need that. A 2 gb SWAP partition is more than enough.