What is the maximum amount of memory you use?

I have 512MB RAM, I can't say it gives my major limitations on binary based distros (aka not Gentoo where I compile everything). I'll give you a rundown of what I have running and the output from free -m (output in MB).

[imp@localhost ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           502        496          6          0          4        158
-/+ buffers/cache:        333        169
Swap:         1008        154        853

I have running: GNOME, XChat, Firefox (8 tabs), Tasks, GNOME-Terminal, The Gimp with a large JPG image, gThumb, OpenOffice.org writer with a 20 page report with large images, and OpenOffice.org Calc. The system has been running for 2 days 14 hours.

I hope this helps you out.

Well it looks like it's been swapping a bit, but that's a lot of stuff you've got open so I guess that's pretty good. How's the speed? Are there any slowdowns and delays when switching between applications or between tabs in Firefox etc.?

When it starts swapping too much here, sometimes just switching between programs takes quite a bit of that annoying disk scratching and delay.

Thanks!

I'm not having any slowdow problems at the moment, though I do sometimes when I have 20+ tabs open in FF, and sometimes scrolling in OO.o can be slow.

dylunio

Thanks. I guess the safest bet against slowdowns would still be 1GB, but 512MB is still a good improvement compared to only 256.. I'll see..

Thanks for helping.

I have 1GB of RAM, and this is how usage looks like when running GNOME, Firefox with ~20 open tabs, Liferea, X-Chat, Exaile, Gnome dictionary and OpenOffice.org Writer with average document opened (this is on a non tweaked Edgy installation I'm trying out these days):

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1010        665        345          0         25        265
-/+ buffers/cache:        375        635
Swap:         2486          0       2486

Notice that it uses only 375MB of memory, the rest is buffered/cached, so 512MB sounds like enough. However, often I have almost entire memory used, with 600-700 MB of it being buffers/cache, so I guess having 1GB does speed up things a bit because of all the cache, although real use is rarely higher then 512MB.

My previous computer had 256MB of memory so I don't know what is the difference between 512MB and 1GB, but with 1GB it never swaps during normal use.

I have 512, and most of the time I think 128 would actually be enough, only when inkscape starts eating memory do I need more than 512. I have never measured how much swap it uses then, cause the system will be so busy swapping I can't really use it, just have to wait until it stops swapping, and by then it probably already has freed most of the memory it temporarily used for some operation.

I'd say that nowadays you'd really need around 1GB of RAM for any computer. Any lower and your computer will probably be aching unless you own a good hard drive. 2GB if you play graphics intense games though

2GB? Either you're kidding, or you're using Vista!

I have 1GB now, and as mentioned before in another thread I mostly use a lot of memory if compiling alot (like testing EasyLFS or building KDE) or play with Blender or Gimp.
Also Cinelerra I think can take up quite some memory.

Actually I will also upgrade to 2GB when I'll make my next step, which will be an AMD64 X2 or something like that.
I have hardly any swapping with the gig I have right now, but I wanna have two GB for a number of reasons, like having no more swapping and also I want to try around with ramdisks to run certain programs.

And before anybody asks, I'm not running Vista, and I don't plan to. I'm happy with that Win2K-installation I have and recently use quite frequently since I decided to have another go with Ultima 9.
And yes, I'm also still playing Ultima 7, in Exult of course.

Alright, so 1GB really is the safest bet here if I wanna be sure it wont swap. I do use inkscape from time to time and I am a quite heavy Firefox user, so I suppose swapping could still happen with 512..

Hmm, well, I might try and go for 1GB from the start, but if the system ends up a bit too expensive I can go for 512 *for now*.

Yeah, Vista would eat that up. But I can imagine a GNU/Linux system needing 2GB in certain cases, at least in bursts, like compiling or heck maybe even some heavy games running on top of KDE or something.. (Having 256MB currently I often go to console and startx with Nexuiz only for example, just so that the WM or DE doesn't spend memory for nothing that could be used for a game).

But 1GB is probably a gold standard here.

I'm at 768MB right now on my Windows XP computer but I'm trying to get at least another 512MB of RAM although an additional 1GB of RAM would be more preferred...either way I should get some more RAM in the summer.