How much does RAM affect WCG?

[[XC] Oj101]

My PC is starting to get painfully slow when multitasking (I don't ever close BOINC) and I was wondering if turning down the amount of RAM I allow it to use would hurt performance badly. If I went from 75% idle / 50% while in use to 50% / 25% would I notice a drop in PPD?

Thanks guys :toast:

[Movieman]

My PC is starting to get painfully slow when multitasking (I don't ever close BOINC) and I was wondering if turning down the amount of RAM I allow it to use would hurt performance badly. If I went from 75% idle / 50% while in use to 50% / 25% would I notice a drop in PPD?

Thanks guys :toast:

Add more ram!:rofl:

[Otis11]

Well if you decrease it to much not only are you going to drop performance, you're also going to thrash your HD...

Just add a gig of ram or so. That's all WCG takes.

[[XC] Oj101]

:shocked: Two replies already!! :shocked:

Let me add that adding RAM to my existing 2GB is not an option at the moment, and I'm really suffering since adding GPUGrid as well (opening Winamp or Opera takes over a minute as opposed to under five seconds). If I can increase my multitasking performance, great. If I can't, I'll quit crunching altogether..... Nooooot :D I'll just grin and bare it :)

[Otis11]

So why is adding RAM not an option? Are all the slots full? Why not just change what I assume are 512MB sticks to 1 or 2 GB sticks?

They're not all that expensive...

[YukonTrooper]

My PC is starting to get painfully slow when multitasking (I don't ever close BOINC) and I was wondering if turning down the amount of RAM I allow it to use would hurt performance badly. If I went from 75% idle / 50% while in use to 50% / 25% would I notice a drop in PPD?

Thanks guys :toast:
Do you reboot the machine at least once every three days or so?

[[XC] Oj101]

There are currently quite a few things with a much much higher priority than a faster Windows experience :( I've worked out my budget to the cent for the next few months, a very large portion of the money is going to education.

[shoota]

What kind of ram does it take?

edit: woot! 1,000 posts!

[[XC] Oj101]

I don't reboot unless there's a power failure :p:

My PC restarted today when I was hotswapping an IDE hard drive and plugged the Molex connector in at a bad angle - after being running for a little over a mont, honestly without a word of a lie it did NOT feel any faster after the clean boot. To me it's a myth, a fallacy.

[[XC] Oj101]

DDR3. At the moment I'm running two 1GB sticks of D9GTR or D9GTS (not sure which) at 1500MHz 6-5-6-18.

Congrats on getting to that milestone in the best section of the forums :D

[shoota]

hehe. thanks. I don't have any ddr3 so i can't help ya. I guess it's grin and bear it time :)

[[XC] Oj101]

Na I'm not asking for handouts, but thank you very much for the offer :)

My question remains, how much RAM is required before performance takes a nosedive? I've crunching on a Phenom 2 965 and GTX260 - I just realised it's relevant.

[shoota]

well on my quad with W7 x64 and no GPUgrid i have about 1.6 GB of usage. but i don't know how much gpugrid takes or whatever else you're doing.. nor have i experimented with ramping down the amount of ram wcg gets to use. maybe someone else knows better...

edit: just checked without FF running and total usage is around 850-900mb, geez what a hog FF is.

[D_A]

WCG doesn't use buckets of RAM normally, and isn't particularly sensitive to RAM speed, either. However, if you use enough in other processes to make the system start paging to disk then you'll kill performance quicker than a vuvuzela at a chess match.

[alucasa]

Personally, I dedicate 500MB of ram for each project.

So, for an I7-860, it does 8 projects at once which I dedicated 4gb RAM to, but 500MB is kind of overkill.

[D_A]

When I build a system I like to work on 1GB per core. That's working on the assumption that the machine will be for general purpose use. I haven't built a machine with hyperthreading as of yet so I can't say if I'll go with that on a per thread basis or on a per physical core basis.

[Snow Crash]

Which subprojects you are running on WCG make a substantial difference ... currently I think HCMD is the lowest (less than 5 meg each) and HCC next lowest (around 32 meg). I just fired up an HPF2 and after 1 minute it is using 72 MB, FAAH weighs in at a whopping 120 MB. Don't even consider CEP2 when it gets released, I think the stated requirement is a gig :shocked:
I've seen GPUGrid take between 50-75 MB each but you have no real choice on those anyway.

If you try changing you project choices around I bet you can still crunch full bore without having to sacrafice performance in any way, shape, or form :up:

[Otis11]

^^ Try going full HCMD or HCC and see if that makes a difference... Should cut your ram usage down significantly.