Any objective way to determine you need more memory?

[scruffylg]

Is there any way to determine whether or not adding more RAM will make a measurable difference in the performance of your machine?

Clearly, more RAM is better. But is it possible to know whether you've got enough RAM such that more RAM will have little or no incremental benefit?

The Windows Task Manager (XP) lists all sorts of metrics on its Performance tab (e.g., Handles, threads, paged kernel memory, peak commit charge, etc.). I have really no idea what most of these mean, but I presume they are listed because they give useful information about the performance of the computer.

Can any of these metrics be checked while running programs to determine whether the computer is "thrashing" and could use more RAM?

Any help answering these questions would be appreciated.

(Please...I'm looking for something beyond "RAM is cheap, go ahead and buy more anyway" or "Ususally, XP runs well with 2GB." I'm trying to learn more about how the computer operates. Thanks.)

 

[degibson]

Its not a perfect measure, but if 1) The Available Physical Memory is low and 2) The hard drive is grinding, then you probably have over pressed your memory system.

 

[Jax Omen]

You always need more RAM!!!

But no, seriously, task manager lets you monitor memory and page file usage. Check that out.

 

[scruffylg]

Thanks for the responses.

Can anyone tell me how to interpret all the data in the task manager about memory usage?

 

[lxskllr]

If your peak memory usage exceeds your physical ram, you'll probably benefit from getting more ram.

 

[DSF]

I'm trying to think of the name of the utility. It may have been called CacheMem, but at any rate it will graph your RAM usage over time. There are almost certainly other freeware or shareware utilities that will do the same thing.

 

[taltamir]

what os are you using?

With any 32bit OS i would either upgrade to 3GB or buy a 2x2GB pair and just deal with not getting ALL of what i paid for (but still better then 2GB).

With vista I would recommend an absolute minimum of 2GB, and really, EVERYONE should be using 4GB on vista. 8GB will also help.

The problem with just looking at CURRENT ram useage is that the OS adjusts for the amount of ram. Vista will disable aero and various other features at under 1GB. It also has preloading capabilities, so the more ram the better. But this gives diminishing returns.

The amount of ram you NEED is enough to avoid HDD paging. That is what kills performance on older computers. To avoid HDD paging you should just do some simple math. XP takes about 700MB of ram, vista about 1.3GB of ram... + more ram for various background programs (anti virus, etc) + ram for activities you do (games, photoshop, decompressing files, etc).

Games take 1 to 2GB of ram, a few select games can go over 2GB. But more will follow. Any type of graphic software like photoshop is a ram pig.

Generally today you should have 2GB of ram for a glorified email / typewriter machine.
4GB of ram if you plan on running games.
8GB of ram if you plan on doing serious graphic design. (touching up a single photo here and there will not require those amounts)

 

[scruffylg]

Thanks for the additional responses.

 

[Jax Omen]

8GB of RAM is also good for people who do extreme-multi-tasking.

But it has to be pretty extreme to justify it over 4GB.