What can I spend my RAM on?

Hexorg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Oct 2009 Posts: 96

Hello everyone, so I have 8Gb of RAM. Currently, with GNOME, Firefox, Eclipse, GIMP, and a few background chat apps, I use 1.0Gb. So is there an automatic option to cache frequently used programs into RAM (I think that's what macs do)? Or maybe any other usage for the RAM that I don't know of? How do you use extra RAM?

P.S. I have /var/tmp/portage in tmpfs, but that only uses when I update stuff.
P.P.S I also saw that you could mound most of the root ( / ) to the tmpfs, which sounds fun.

John R. Graham · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 5:14 pm Post subject:

The system automatically is spending your RAM on disk cache. That's what the "cached" number on the swap space line in "top" is telling you.

- John
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aCOSwt · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 5:31 pm Post subject:

If you oversized your RAM that much... could well be that your processor is oversized similarly...
In which case... please... don't hesitate a second : Install sci-misc/boinc
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Hexorg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Oct 2009 Posts: 96

Actually I am using boinc for folding@home and lhc@home (Test4Theory)

DaggyStyle · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 4735

tmpfs for portage emerge when the wife isn't using windows img (which has 10gb of ram allocated).
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