Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[William Witteman via talk]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2024 at 07:24, William Park via talk  wrote:

>
> On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
> > My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.
>  > ...
>
> I don't believe you.  What do you use for main disk?  I tried doing this
> with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up
> with all the hassles.
>

Please don't do this. This list survives because people willingly read it -
publically doubting other people, who you have no idea about, makes this
list much less useful or welcoming.

Other people, faced with the same trade-offs that any of us face, will make
different choices.

If you want to know about how and why someone uses a Raspberry Pi for a
desktop, ask a question - ask 6! But, please, consider that you are
broadcasting your judgement to a whole list, and that other people may take
that as hostile and simply go somewhere else.

"Be curious, not judgemental."

Thanks.
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[Mauro Souza via talk]

On the swap usage:

There's a parameter (swappiness, on /proc/sys/vm/swappiness or vm.swappiness
on /etc/sysctl.conf) that tells the kernel how aggressively to swap. A
value of 100 will swap as much as possible until the swap file is full,
while 0 will never ever swap, even if there's space and OOP killer started
gunning processes down because of lack of memory. That changed some kernel
versions ago, before the change a 0 would only swap when memory was
exhausted, and now a 0 means never ever swap no matter what. I was left
trying to figure out why OOP was killing processes when the swap file was
empty.

On virtual servers I usually keep swappiness at 1, so it won't swap unless
there's real need, and on desktops I keep at 85 to free up memory for the
file cache. On a RasPi with sdcard storage, I would keep it close to 10,
because it's better on the SD to read than to write...

Mauro
https://www.maurosouza.com - registered Linux User: 294521
Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God.


On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 9:24 AM William Park via talk 
wrote:

>
> On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
> > My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.
>  > ...
>
> I don't believe you.  What do you use for main disk?  I tried doing this
> with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up
> with all the hassles.
>
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[mwilson--- via talk]

William Park wrote:
> On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:
>> My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.
>  > ...
>
> I don't believe you.  What do you use for main disk?  I tried doing this
> with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up
> with all the hassles.

Ok.  But that's what I'm using.
The main drive is a 128GB SD chip with the software, the home directories
and the ordinary working data, small development projects and things.
BUT the big directories with pictures and what-not that I mentioned are on
a 2TB Western Digital USB drive.
No hassles that I've found, except that the Raspberry Pi foundation can
lag behind the state-of-the-art in applications.  I was moaning here
before about failing to get .avif graphic support compiled.  That's only
just arrived in ImageMagick in Debian 12 on the laptop.  So working with
.avif files means a lot of rsync'ing and ssh'ing and messing around.
>
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[William Park via talk]

On 2024-02-19 20:32, mwilson--- via talk wrote:

My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.

> ...

I don't believe you.  What do you use for main disk?  I tried doing this 
with Odroid (top of the line in this embedded space), but got fed up 
with all the hassles.


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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[David Collier-Brown via talk]

On 2024-02-20 02:12, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


Your RAM having 1.2 GiB available does not actually indicate that RAM
is tight.  Much of the occupied space might be evictable files.

If you were truly short of RAM + swap, I think you would see OOM
messages in the log.


I used to look at writes to the swap device as an indicator of
how much I needed to reclaim memory. There will always be a certain amount
but when it takes a step upwards at the time I added load, then I'm
low on available memory.

I have the numbers for Solaris around somewhere, but it was the sudden jump
that tended to tip me off.

--dave

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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: mwilson--- via talk 

| My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.

Neat!

| `top` says that swap is full (100MiB), but there's 1.2 GiB of memory
| available.

I'd be tempted to add swap.  But then again, if that is on an SD card,
maybe not.

I don't know the kernel policies.  Or rather, I know a lot of
different kernels' policies.  So this will be unreliable.

1. Paging policies tend to migrate pages that haven't been used
   recently, but must be preserved, to swap.  Code pages don't need to
   be written to swap because they are immutable -- they can be
   reloaded from the original file.

2. If there is no memory pressure (i.e. more RAM than things to occupy
   it), probably nothing goes to swap.

3. It used to be that RAM was used for processes: code and data.  For
   a few decades, files have been allowed to fill up available RAM but
   could be easily evicted to their place in the filesystem when
   memory pressure got high.  Eviction often requires no I/O: if the
   file was only being read.  Consequence: RAM may all be used but
   since things can be evicted there is room for more stuff: you
   haven't run out.

4. In the last couple of years a new level of swap has been created:
   compressed swap stored in a RAM-disk.  This sounds crazy but makes
   sense if the stuff being swapped is significantly compressable.
   And if writing to swap is slow (eg. SD card)

So:

Your swap being full may mean that some stuff is stranded in RAM
even though it isn't used much.

Your RAM having 1.2 GiB available does not actually indicate that RAM
is tight.  Much of the occupied space might be evictable files.

If you were truly short of RAM + swap, I think you would see OOM
messages in the log.

| GIMP that came with Raspberry Pi OS is not wonderfully stable -- might
| crash once a day on average.  Doesn't seem directly due to memory shortage
| though.  Console messages from one time that I ran it from the command
| line hinted that there might be mutual exclusion problems with GtK, or
| something.

Are you running it from GDB?  In theory that might help you figure out
what's going on.  But GDB would like to to install the symbols for
executables that you care about and that may overwhelm your SD card.
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[mwilson--- via talk]

Howard Gibson wrote:
> I probably spend too much time on YouTube.  I use GIMP to mess with
> photographs.  I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am
> sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document
> formats.
> --
> Howard Gibson

My main desktop is a Raspberry Pi 4B+ with 8GiB.  Mostly I'm messing with
GIMP on smallish pictures, about 1000 pixels square.  Just now GIMP has
about a dozen of these open.  Plus two dozen instances of an Image Viewer
program that I concocted with Python and PIL, and 3 or 4 pcmanfm windows
with thumbnails  of up to a couple thousand of these pictures each.
`top` says that swap is full (100MiB), but there's 1.2 GiB of memory
available.

GIMP that came with Raspberry Pi OS is not wonderfully stable -- might
crash once a day on average.  Doesn't seem directly due to memory shortage
though.  Console messages from one time that I ran it from the command
line hinted that there might be mutual exclusion problems with GtK, or
something.

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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Howard Gibson via talk 

| On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST)
| "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:

| > What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?

| I probably spend too much time on YouTube.  I use GIMP to mess with 
| photographs.  I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am 
| sharing info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document 
| formats.

Thanks for the reply.

We do some of those things on 8 GiB.

Which of those tasks actually pinch when you run them on an 8 GiB system?
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[joeDoe via talk]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 05:18:13PM -0500, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST)
> "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:
> 
> > | From: Howard Gibson via talk 
> > | 
> > |I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM.  For 
> > |GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.
> > 
> > What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?
> 
> Hughk
> 
> I probably spend too much time on YouTube.  I use GIMP to mess with 
> photographs.  I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am sharing 
> info, I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document formats. 

I'm using a lenovo x240 with 8GB of RAM for pretty much the same type of
usage. This is actually my second x240. When the first one crapped out I
resorted to using a Pentium (MS Vista era, not a modern core called pentium)
with 3GB of RAM while hunting for a replacement. 

The default install on the Pentium created a ridiculously small SWAP space
which caused problems, but once I increased it, it ran quite nicely if a
bit slow compared to the x240.

--
joeDoe
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[Howard Gibson via talk]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 12:31:08 -0500 (EST)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:

> | From: Howard Gibson via talk 
> | 
> |I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM.  For 
> |GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.
> 
> What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?

Hughk

I probably spend too much time on YouTube.  I use GIMP to mess with 
photographs.  I use LaTeX a lot to prepare documents, but if I am sharing info, 
I use LibreOffice, and the Microsoft office document formats. 

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgib...@eol.ca
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[Michael Galea via talk]

On 2024-02-19 10:32, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 02:52:38 -0500 (EST)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:


I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca.
Dead deal:


Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM.
Only one was occupied.  It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM.


Hugh,

I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM.  For 
GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.

My travel laptop has only 4gb ram and is very very nimble. My wife winds 
up loading at least 4 firefox tabs with google maps and as many media 
rich tabs of museums or other attractions. I was even prepared to use 
xfce on it but it runs KDE 5 perfectly fine.


Hugh pointed it out last year, a cheap chromebook at Best Buy for 
$99.99, a lenovo

ideapad 3 11" chromebook, celeron-n4020 64gb emmc, 4gb-ram

It is very light.  It started out life as a chromebook until I 
corebooted it  and now run Debian testing  on a crypted file system.  I 
would be annoyed if was stolen or lost, but at $99 I wouldn't be crying.


The only issue I have with it is that I have never been able to get the 
internal sound card working, I'm using a DAC instead.


PS: I ran linux on chromeos for a while but was unhappy with a) the two 
OS maintenance, b) the trouble getting a VPN up to the mother ship and 
c) not being able to crypt the box and d) the inconvenience.


--
Michael Galea

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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

| From: Howard Gibson via talk 
| 
|I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM.  For 
|GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum.

What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB?

For me, it is Firefox with a lot of tabs.  I'm sure that some web pages 
are way more RAM-intensive than others (see about:performance) but I 
rarely pick pages based on weight.  I admit that I keep way too many tabs 
open but mostly on my desktop which has 24 GiB of RAM.

I regularly run Fedora / GNOME desktop on 4 G machines.  They work but are 
not fast, for multiple reasons.  They have Atom-microarchitecture 
processors and eMMC "disks", both of which slow them down.  On the plus 
side, they are delightfully inexpensive, small, energy efficient, and 
silent.

I have several notebooks, of varying ages, with 8 GiB of RAM.  They all 
work fine.

RAM is cheap enough to overbuy, except when you are forced to buy it with 
the computer.  Manufacturers really pad the price of computers with more 
RAM.  Most notebooks now come with soldered RAM, not socketed.

Some notebooks come with soldered RAM plus an empty or occupied socket.  
That's not as good as two sockets. Best performance, all other things 
being equal, is to have the same RAM size in the socket and soldered.  
Any variation comes at a cost.

One reason I bought this particular cheap notebook is that it came with a 
perfect memory configuration for upgrading to 16 GiB.

A certain amount of RAM is tied up in fixed overhead assignments: the 
kernel, the memory used by the iGPU, the memory used by NVMe drives.  So 
doubling RAM makes more than twice as much RAM available for applications.

In this particular case, adding RAM added RAM bandwidth, improving the 
speed of computation.
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Re: [GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[Howard Gibson via talk]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 02:52:38 -0500 (EST)
"D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk"  wrote:

> I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca.
> Dead deal: 
> 
> 
> Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM.
> Only one was occupied.  It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM.

Hugh,

   I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM.  For GNU/Linux, 
16GB minimum.  

-- 
Howard Gibson 
hgib...@eol.ca
http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson
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[GTALUG] War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed

[D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk]

I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca.
Dead deal: 


Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM.
Only one was occupied.  It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM.

- two stick should perform better: allow dual-channel memory access

- many consider 8 GiB too little RAM these days.  I'm not sure that's true
  but more cannot hurt

I bought another 8 GiB stick with the same specs from Amazon for $25.99 
and installed it.


I ran passmark benchmarking software before and after the upgrade



The Passmark Rating (whatever that is) went up about 20%.
You can see that the laptop still has modest performance.

I'm glad the HP included one 8 GiB stick instead of two 4 GiB sticks.  
That made it cheap for me to upgrade (add one stick instead of replacing 
two) but it made the off-the-shelf performance worse.
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