Virtual Memory for N800

[BigBoss]

What is the size of virtual memory, which will benefit the performance of N800 most? Is 64MB enough?

[schmots]

I use 128.. because you can. You can also create swap partitions on your card and use those.. however that will reduce the life expentancy of the card

[TA-t3]

I haven't actually enabled any swap space yet for my N800.. it's been happy with its 128MB RAM so far, no out-of-memory problems (yet). Mostly I don't run more than a few apps at the same time, although I may have up to 3 opera instances running.

[Milhouse]

You can also create swap partitions on your card and use those.. however that will reduce the life expentancy of the card

Is there any real evidence for this?

[BigBoss]

What is the size of your internal memory card? Can you tell me how to create swap partitions? Thanks.


I use 128.. because you can. You can also create swap partitions on your card and use those.. however that will reduce the life expentancy of the card

[schmots]

Is there any real evidence for this?

Swap will in essences constantly read and write for the card. Based on the "Life Cycles" of memory cards, it will limit its life. Now does this mean it will only work for 10 years instead of 50, I don't know.. never had a memory card stop working.

[Milhouse]

@schmots: you're correct of course - writing will lessen the life expectancy of a card. I'd like to know if there is any evidence that confirms how much the life expectancy of a card is reduced by writes, I'm guessing this kind of information is fairly thin on the ground and that most cards, even with a swap file, will outlive the usefulness of N800 device itself! :)

[BigBoss]

What is swap file?

Can anyone tell me the size of memory I should allocate for virtural memory?

[Mika73]

I suppose that even using those as virtual memory does less their life.. Memory card does last logn enought. And cards are cheap anyway. I guess when my 4GB stops working, card like that cost very little.

[BigBoss]

Dear Mika73, you use all yr 4GB as VM?

[quentinwolf]

Dear Mika73, you use all yr 4GB as VM?

I'd say that using 4gigs would be completely pointless, that is if it let you select that much to begin with. Right now, without doing any hacking, the current max is 128mb through the control panel.

[Nik1]

Does the virtual memory make much of an impact? I thought SD flash is too slow to be efficently run as RAM.

[lbattraw]

Does the virtual memory make much of an impact? I thought SD flash is too slow to be efficently run as RAM.

It's not that fast, but considering that access time is a big factor (which affects normal PCs using hard drives as virtual memory/swap), SD cards are very quick. A little bit will help when you have multiple browser windows open with complex/large pages, although with 128M of RAM it's less of a issue. It's better than running out of memory and crashing/forcing programs to close.

Larry

[phil4]

What is swap file?


Dunno, if the other posts have helped, but just in case, here goes:

You N800 has 128Mb of RAM, which it uses to run programs and the temporary data they use (the web page and graphics you're looking at for example). If you open too many programs then you can use up all of that 128Mb. If that happens, as there is no more memory, you'll find you can't run any more programs, and some of the existing ones will crash (as they try and get more mem, but can't).

The solution is a swap file, where chunks of memory that aren't used any more are moved to the external device (an SD card in this case), freeing up the internal memory.

You don't want this happening too much, as swap space is inherently slower than real RAM (especially the case with PCs which use their much slower harddisks as swap space), but the extra headroom is a bonus if you're running out of space.

[Mika73]

Dear Mika73, you use all yr 4GB as VM?

Ofcourse not. Virtual memory is 128MB and memorycards total size is 4GB.