Most commodity computers come with too little RAM.  Manufacturers don’t deal with your data, they deal with price points.  So, your new computer most likely came with just enough RAM to boot up and run whatever demos the vendor bundled.

At Chaos Central, the Unix Curmudgeon (and the nice person he lives with) run mostly Linux and Solaris.  But, we do have one machine running Windows XP for those got-to-have programs (like Internet Explorer, for testing CSS code and fixing IE bugs in it, and some other programs that use Microsoft’s DLLs to read/write database files).  The desktop machines and servers aren’t much problem, because we build them to order, but laptops and other preloaded systems have the lowest-bidder issue with RAM.

Recently, after installing Google Chrome on our Linux laptop, we started noticing a bit of thrashing going on with 30 or 40 tabs open in Chrome, along with the usual and customary background of MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache2, and other trappings of a developer’s system.  The aging HP-Compaq came with Windows Vista, which we used long enough to download and burn a copy of Ubuntu 7.04, and 1GB of RAM, which did not make Vista look like something you could actually use, but was adequate for Ubuntu, pre-Chrome.  But, finally, the upgrade-or-replace issue came to the fore, and, with recession in full recovery and housing sales not so much, we elected to upgrade, bumping up to 2GB.  Aha, that is the sweet spot.  I can now run for several days before Chrome or Firefox gobbles up enough memory to initiate that feeling that your computer is executing machine code off the disk, which it essentially is when swap space gets used up.

The Windows machine, we pretty much ignored, putting up with performance so slow that the disk light stayed on all the time and wire-frames of applications that promised to open “someday” hung on the screen behind the “hourglass of death.”  However, with Tax Day only a month away and Turbo Tax freezing whenever we went to find yet another receipt or IRS form, we shelled out $100, about 1/3 of what we paid for the refurbished, off-lease box in the first place, to bump RAM from 256M to 2GB.  Hey, Windows actually loads fast enough to mellow the Curmudgeon from hating XP absolutely to merely loathing it.

Meanwhile, the nice person’s Linux box is running 64-bit on 3GB, and doesn’t even slow down when the Curmudgeon lights off yet another virtual machine in the background.  In fact, XP runs even faster in a virtual machine on this box than it does on the upgraded stand-alone machine.  Next year, we’re doing our taxes on a virtual machine.  Hmm, now that the designated Windows box runs better, just think of how snappy it will be when we reload it with FreeBSD or CentOS.