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Legacy Forums => Experienced User Forum => Topic started by: Cincron on April 25, 2002, 12:27:24 AM

Title: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Cincron on April 25, 2002, 12:27:24 AM

How do you know when you have enough RAM?

My OS is obviously SME 5.1.2 and here are my specs

-AMD Athlon 900mhz (socket A) 200mhz FSB running @ 934mhz
-MSI K7t Pro2a motherboard
-Maxtor 60gb 7200rpm HDD
-ATI X-Pert 98 8mb Video
-Asus 52x CD-ROM
-512mb of PC-133 SDRAM
-258mb allocated for SWAP


On my "phpsysinfo" it said I am using @74mb of RAM and 0mb SWAP... If I decrease my RAM, say downsize to 384mb or 256mb, will I see a BIG difference in performance?


Reason...
Ram is Expensive but getting cheaper, I would like to move some of this RAM to my File/Print Server, if it is not needed in my webserver. If you think that it is needed, I will just have to bite the bullet and buy more :-)

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Chris Meredith on April 25, 2002, 12:47:21 AM

It really depends on how much activity you get to your site, and what you are running in the backround.  If you have a low traffic site with little or no database activity you wouldn't notice much of a drop by going to 256-384Mb of RAM in my opinion.

Lack of RAM and drive access speed can both turn into bottlenecks fast though, so as your activity scales up you might want to have some RAM handy.

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Julian Luton on April 25, 2002, 12:53:53 AM

I agree with Chris - however what bandwidth are you on - e.g. a dsl connection with only 256k upstream could be saturated with a webserver running on a P133 with 64Mb of memory.

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Cincron on April 25, 2002, 01:00:03 AM

I am on 756k/512k ADSL...

My SME server is a stand alone, and just used for web/mail application. it is not as a gateway. I leave that up to my Netopia R910 (sorry, I didnt learn about SME or Smoothwall till much later), and it works great.

I am running phpnuke with mysql. I have just set it up in the last couple of days so it isn't anywhere close to being called a website yet, but it is there running.

My Configurations are in my first message. I am not a p133, I am AMD Athlon 900mhz socket A....  :-)

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: JD on April 25, 2002, 10:06:37 AM

Watch your swap file ... you can probably
move 128M off the webserver without a
penalty hit.  Performance bottleneck will
probably be the 512k upload DSL pipe.

check the 'free' command.  You can also
run the 'top' command and see which services
are heavily using memory/processor resources.

You could probably increase the amount
of memory used by your db server, even
on just 384M, or even 256M.   If MySQL,
check out the /etc/my.cnf file and see
the mysql website for info about tuning.  

Performance could also be tweeked by making
sure that your db indexes are optimized.

I've been running a mysql/apache/php web
server in an office enviornment for over
three years.  Current box - twin  P3 933
with 512M running on hardware RAID SCSI-160
38G drives - doesn't show much difference
than the 500M P3 w/256M it replaced.

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Bobby on April 25, 2002, 06:46:02 PM

Well, I'm running 5.1.2 on a 486/66 with 32MB & it does the gateway / webserving / Samba stuff fine. Webmail is too painful to use and the server manager is a bit slow, but otherwise it's great.

Title: Re: How Much RAM is enough?
Post by: Ale on April 26, 2002, 12:53:26 AM

Cincron the use you describe is too small for that hardware, you are wasting a lot o hardware.
your problem could be the adsl connection bottleneck.

you could have that task done by a pentium, pentium II or celeron processor, 128/256 mb RAM and ovbiously the rest of the hardware is big enough (too much in my opinion)
 your phpsysinfo report is very instructive in this way....
I think you would not notice performance changes if you decrease all your hardware.
Ale