In another post on here Cecil had advised someone to not go over 512mb of RAM.

Is more RAM actually somehow bad? Or is it just excessive? I was running 1gb in one of my previous builds, and noticed that I would end up dipping into swap space from time to time, so I purchased 2gb for my next build (yeah, had money burning a hole in my pocket). I would at times be recording 2 shows (SD, no HD in this system), flagging both shows, and encoding a file to Xvid all at the same time.

When I was tooling out my new build I figured 2 X 1gb (dual channel) would be nice and juicy! Did I make an error?

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I'm of the opinion that one needs no more than 1 gig in a PVR. but that is just my opinion.

I've had a fair amount of success running 512 in SD Mythboxes, and a gig in HD Mythboxes....

Just to clarify, i never saw any performance issues.... the machine was never lagging or stuttering or anything like that. I just noticed that if I was SSHd in and checked 'top' that there would be some swap space in use.

I don't use linux often enough to really know if this means much.... I just figured "oh, next time I'll add more so it doesn't have to swap" I have a funny feeling that when I install (with the new version once it hits) that the system is going to see all this ram, and still use the swap space from time to time though. Am I likely right?

I won't be moving down from 2gb though. This is the only system I have in the house that takes DDR2, and the ram is alreayd purchased, so 2gb it is!

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If you're recording while commflagging in HD, you can use more than 1GB of RAM. Add maybe another couple hundred MB for a second simultaneous recording and commflagging, plus more if you happened to be running your own transcode job on an old recording. It all depends on what your usage pattern is, and how much you will do in parallel rather than in series.

I have no data on SD recordings.

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I think the concept of too much memory being a problem dates back to older versions of Windows which allegedly had a "sweet spot" after which memory management algorithms became inefficient and could supposedly hurt performance.

Even back then I never saw proof where a PC performed measurably worse after adding memory. I did have one client who was adamant about the "too much memory problem." So, I advised him to buy even more memory, configure everything over the sweet spot as a ramdrive, and store his swapfile on it. I said he'd get all the benefit of the sweet spot, and save on disk I/0. I don't know if he ever tried it; or just realized I was a smartass, but he quit arguing with me about it which was good enough.


What it boils down to is that there is a certain amount of memory above which you will stop seeing performance GAINS, but going past that point will only hurt your wallet.

THe RAM is already purchased, so the damage to the wallet has already taken place..... I just wanted to know if pulling a stick woudl somehow help things (I really couldn't see how it would).

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Too lazy to update this with my current hardware, I'll redo it during my next install =)

I found that 2GB speeds things up considerably, particularly transcoding.

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Even today Windows has a hard time using a lot of RAM. In XP 32bit a process can't use more than 2gb of ram by itself. If you do a special hack to the registry and some other files you can get a process to use 3gb of ram but it causes grief for many things which depend on memory addressing. You can have up to 4gb on a XP 32 bit install, but for the most part the extra 2gb won't be used much at all. Now, on a 64 bit install, things change considerably.

I use 512mb or ram with an Athlon XP 3200+ but I plan to go to 1gb when I build my new mythbox when the listing stuff is straightened out.

Man, that's quite a serious limitation for Windows, particularly since it doesn't work very well with < 1GB. Means a narrow performance window.

Mike

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Australian Dragon
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http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
It sounds like it applies to any 32bit PC OS.

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Paul Turpie
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