From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Dec 23 16:26:25 2000 From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Dec 23 16:26:23 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dodo.prod.itd.earthlink.net (dodo.prod.itd.earthlink.net [207.217.120.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3857737B400 for ; Sat, 23 Dec 2000 16:26:22 -0800 (PST) Received: from datawok.com (ip155.san-angelo2.tx.pub-ip.psi.net [38.31.16.155]) by dodo.prod.itd.earthlink.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA25437 for ; Sat, 23 Dec 2000 16:26:20 -0800 (PST) Sender: algould@dodo.prod.itd.earthlink.net Message-ID: <3A454399.4F932D97@datawok.com> Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 18:30:17 -0600 From: "Andrew L. Gould" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.16 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Cost/benefit of more RAM Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi all, I'm running a database server on an Athlon 700 with 384MB RAM. The database has large tables; but none exceed 10 million rows. The services most often used are MySQL, PostgreSQL and Apache with PHP. The tables are accessed through the network via ODBC drivers. The box has 3 slots for RAM, all of which are occupied by a 128MB stick of RAM. Now that the price for 256MB sticks have come down, I'm thinking about adding more RAM. The question is: How can I tell if adding RAM will be beneficial? If the CPU's usage runs at 99% or higher and the RAM usage is around 80%, does this indicate that more RAM won't help any due to the CPU's limits? Does the usage of swap space indicate that more RAM would be beneficial? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks; and Happy Holidays, Andrew Gould To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message