How to get the benifit from more RAM

[Leevi]

I have upgraded my HP2133's RAM from 512MB to 2GB. I have not noticed any remarkable speed increase so I'm asking if there are any actions I should do in order to get the full benefit from more memory?
/Leevi

[MikeTbob]

Are you sure the machine supports that much RAM? open a terminal window and type this command

free

Or

cat /proc/meminfo

[Leevi]

Here are the results
Leevi

laptop:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       1811800     337688    1474112          0      14456     148600
-/+ buffers/cache:     174632    1637168
Swap:      1309256          0    1309256

laptop:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      1811800 kB
MemFree:       1298200 kB
Buffers:         17396 kB
Cached:         279932 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         276424 kB
Inactive:       195692 kB
HighTotal:      916160 kB
HighFree:       452352 kB
LowTotal:       895640 kB
LowFree:        845848 kB
SwapTotal:     1309256 kB
SwapFree:      1309256 kB
Dirty:              68 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:      174840 kB
Mapped:          55032 kB
Slab:            24488 kB
SReclaimable:    12900 kB
SUnreclaim:      11588 kB
PageTables:       2460 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
WritebackTmp:        0 kB
CommitLimit:   2215156 kB
Committed_AS:   543044 kB
VmallocTotal:   110584 kB
VmallocUsed:      6464 kB
VmallocChunk:   103588 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
HugePages_Rsvd:      0
HugePages_Surp:      0
Hugepagesize:     4096 kB
DirectMap4k:      8192 kB
DirectMap4M:    909312 kB

[MikeTbob]

Your system seems to be showing 1811800 RAM, for comparison mine is as follows and I also have 2 GB.

free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2073248 1348256 724992 0 324216 716936
-/+ buffers/cache: 307104 1766144
Swap: 265032 176 264856

Maybe that is the max your system will support. I do not know for sure.
I suppose you could try turning off some unneeded services to see if that will improve things a bit.

[Leevi]

I think the basic HW should be similar. There are differences in HD and memory.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/q.../13009_na.html

I bought the PC with Suse Desktop 10 and replaced the OS with Ubuntu 8.10. I have a hacked video driver in use since there is not a driver for Ubuntu. Could that be a reason for the lower total memory?

Did you make andy changes in BIOS when you upgraded the RAM? I'm using Kingston RAM (KVR667D2S5/2G).

/Leevi

[Touchtecservers]

Are you using a shared memory graphics card? If so, then that would maybe be the reason for the shortage of memory there?

[Leevi]

Yes, the VIA driver uses RAM for its purposes like below. I suppose the LInux value is low because the Linux machines have been sold with 512MB RAM. I hope my machine is using more than that.

VIA Chrome 9
Up to 256 MB of shared system memory for Windows with 2 GB of system memory
Up to 128 MB of shared system memory for Windows with 1 GB of system memory
Up to 64 MB of shared system memory for Linux

/Leevi

[Touchtecservers]

Then the 256MB missing from your memory is not an issue with your system - its a feature.

As for improving the system speed. Maybe make your /tmp directory use tmpfs.

What software are you using that you feel would benefit from the extra memory?

[MikeTbob]

From the link you posted above, you have the max RAM the system can handle. I think the rest of your RAM is being used for Video as mentioned by Touchtecservers.
In my experience Ubuntu was one of the (if not the one) slowest distro's I have ever installed, but that could just be my hardware and not particularly a Ubuntu problem. Did Suse run fairly well before you installed Ubuntu?

[Leevi]

Then the 256MB missing from your memory is not an issue with your system - its a feature.

As for improving the system speed. Maybe make your /tmp directory use tmpfs.

What software are you using that you feel would benefit from the extra memory?

From the link you posted above, you have the max RAM the system can handle. I think the rest of your RAM is being used for Video as mentioned by Touchtecservers.
In my experience Ubuntu was one of the (if not the one) slowest distro's I have ever installed, but that could just be my hardware and not particularly a Ubuntu problem. Did Suse run fairly well before you installed Ubuntu?

Of course I would like to increase the speed and I have noticed some disturbances when running JACK ctrl and drum machine called Hydrogen. I would say that I'm very satisfied with the laptop in general. Small size, good quality of the finishing, everything needed for travel use like WLAN andWEB-camera make it perfect for me. I have read that processor is not the best choice for this but it doesn't matter. The machine was the cheapest laptop I have ever seen and it is still HP. I changed SUSE to Ubuntu because the available amount of music SW was quite limited there. I did not noticed that SUSE had been faster than Ubuntu.

/Leevi