More RAM

[lionwing]

My laptop is around six months old and at the time of order I compromised on the amount of RAM to stay within budget.

Well now it is time to put that right!

I enquired with PCS recently about a upgrade but they advised they don't offer this brand / type of RAM anymore.

Does anybody have any suggestions for a decent source of new RAM and if I bought a 16GB chip would it work fine alongside my current 8GB?

Thank you.

 

[ubuysa]

Out of interest, why do you think you need more RAM? What indications do you get that you are short of RAM?

 

[Oussebon]

And specifically why would you need 24gb rather than 16gb?

 

[lionwing]

There is no single clear indication I am short of RAM. I often multitask on the computer using flight simulation software and programs to support that. While overall performance is satisfactory it isn't great and I believe more RAM will help improve matters being as the rest of the laptop spec is as follows;

Oussebon - why would I not want a total of 24GB over 16GB?

 

[Oussebon]

Because you're pretty unlikely to get any benefit from it, and it's about twice as much cash.

Have you monitored per-thread CPU usage (not per-core) and GPU +VRAM usage when running your sim? With something like MSI afterburner's on screen display.

 

[lionwing]

Oussebon

Understood from the cost point of view. Thanks. So going to 16GB (i.e one extra stick of 8GB) might be a good idea?

It is worth backing up my "feel" with some solid figures so thank you for the suggestion. I'll look into MSI Afterburner this evening.

 

[ubuysa]

Open up the Windows Resource Monitor and look at the graph on the right labelled Memory, that's your RAM usage. There are two traces on this graph, the blue line is the RAM that is 'in use' and unless that is regularly up at 100% you are probably not short of RAM (Windows tries to use all the RAM it can however, so a high 'in use' is not always an indicator that you are short of RAM). The green trace is the acid test however, this is the hard page fault rate, and without going into the nuts and bolts of virtual memory management, if this graph is continuously close to zero (or better yet, not present at all) you absolutely are not short of RAM and adding more will make no difference. If this graph has peaks (and especially if these go over 100 hard page faults per second) then you probably are short of RAM and more RAM will make a noticeable difference.

Obviously you need to check this graph when you think your system is most heavily loaded.

 

[lionwing]

OK..thanks for the input so far.

I have put the laptop under load this evening with a session on P3D and associated addons while browsing and working in the background on a few other tasks.

The Resource Manager generally looked like this;

The "Hard Page Fault" graph was reasonably active generally spiking around a third of the way up a few times with one "spike" hitting the peak.

 

[ubuysa]

OK..thanks for the input so far.

I have put the laptop under load this evening with a session on P3D and associated addons while browsing and working in the background on a few other tasks.

The Resource Manager generally looked like this;

The "Hard Page Fault" graph was reasonably active generally spiking around a third of the way up a few times with one "spike" hitting the peak.

More RAM will probably be of benefit to you then.

Those hard page faults are pages that used to be in RAM which have been paged-out to the pagefile because Windows was running short of RAM and the process hadn't referenced those pages for a long time. The page fault happens when the process references a page that's on the pagefile and no longer in RAM. This is a BIG deal, because the process is now stopped until the wanted page is paged-in, and that can take some time, especially if the pagefile is on a slow (or busy) hard disk. You will see this page-in delay as a performance hit (delay) in the affected process.

A page fault is the result of an earlier page steal and that's caused by RAM getting close to exhaustion. Thus a consistent hard page fault rate is almost always indicative of more RAM being needed.

 

[lionwing]

Ubuysa

Brilliant advice and thank you very much for your help with this.

I'ill start pricing up some sensible options.

 

[bfranklin]

Great post, thanks for this. Will definitely be checking out my RAM usage in detail later on!