Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
I believe you, and that's probably a good approach for your needs, but I don't think it applies to Gregg's current situation. He has modest needs and will be installing Xubuntu. 4GB should be enough. RAM might be "cheap" but how cheap is it if it's not used?
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4GB is probably adequate, but more is better.
Ubuntu tries to do everything in RAM. It allocates a swap area to handle cases where there isn't enough physical RAM to satisfy demand. Like other current OSes, RAM is divided into 4K pages, and if more RAM is needed than available, pages not recently used are moved to the swap partition, and the OS keeps a table of which pages are swapped out. If something tried to access a swapped out page, a "page fault" occurs and the page is swapped back in. Total memory is considered to be physical memory plus the size of the allocated swap file.
What you really want is that swap stays blissfully unused, and there's enough physical RAM.to handle demand for best performance.
Since one use Greg mentions is image editing, I'd want to install more RAM. That tends to be a RAM intensive process.
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Dennis