[Gllug] increase performance by increasing RAM or increasing in Core

[John Hearns]

2009/2/16 Christopher Hunter <cehunter at gb-x.org>:
> However, the biggest bottleneck in PCs these days is still the speed of
> the RAM - it's often not much use having a processor running in the GHz
> range when RAM can only be addressed in the MHz range.

Well said. At this point we should start a discussion of using the
processors performance counters to measure cache misses etc. I doubt
Diana really wants to do this though!
On the Altix architecture, SGI have a really cute graphical monitor
which shows the state of all your CPUs and you can see CPU
utilisation, cache misses etc.


Of course,
> larger available RAM reduces the need for even slower hard disk access
> (to and from those horrible "swap" files), so more RAM is generally a
> good idea, though there is a law of diminishing returns when you get
> above (perhaps) 4 Gb.
Again, well said. But Diana, and anyone else for that matter, should
use built in monitoring tools to see if the machine is swapping, and
how much RAM is being used for caches etc.
As a first step, just run 'top' in one windo and monitor it. Is your
system swapping?

The next step would be to install the 'sysstat' package and use 'sar'
to monitor your system.
I've recently found 'ksar' which is a KDE frontend which graphs sar
data. Dead easy to get up and running.
http://ksar.atomique.net/
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug