How much memory is "useful"
My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL
memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8 database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program. Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk access or limited memory was slowing down things? |
How much memory is "useful"
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8 database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program. Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk access or limited memory was slowing down things? At the moment, we don't know what OS you use. The Task Manager interface varies a bit between OSes. I expect you have a 64 bit OS, later than WinXP. ******* The Task Manager (and a button on it that launches Resource Monitor), provide feedback on how things are going. I would start there. At the moment, you have "the perfect amount of RAM", so I would need conclusive evidence from your research, to recommend even more of it. When you have tons of RAM, it takes a while to fill it. So an operation you thought might take "a second", well, it takes 25 seconds on a machine full of RAM. Some programs only fill RAM at around 1GB/sec, even though the STREAM benchmark runs at 17GB/sec. Using one stick of RAM per channel, allows using XMP RAM (automatic setup), saving a lot of messing about. When you install a total of four sticks, the tuning process will require more of your time, to ensure it is error free. XMP typically supports two sticks total with Command Rate 1T, or two sticks total with Command Rate 2T. Since only 2T makes any sense, the first profile is a waste of your time. While I have heard rumors of XMP with a profile for 2 sticks and the other profile is for 4 sticks, I certainly don't own any of that. So I have to adjust tCAS, memory clock, Vnb, or whatever, all by myself when I have four sticks. Um, what fun. The last time, it took me two days, because I did it wrong the first time. ******* In Task Manager, you'll be looking at the "percentage of disk I/O" being used, to see if the disk is so slow as to be holding things up. If doing a database lookup causes the disk to go to 100% I/O, that would be a sign an SSD could help. If you look at the RAM in Task Manager, and all 16GB is used, and the system is paging (hard fault indicator indicates hundred of hard faults per second), then maybe I might be convinced more RAM would help. ******* I have a machine with a ****load of RAM (64GB). I'm not impressed. So many things have been slower than they should be, the list would take forever to type out. I just bought an SSD a couple days ago. But, I put it on a slow computer. I'm kinda impressed, but I still see file system searches to be slow. The SSD might be capable of 100,000 IO operations per second or so, and yet if I use Agent Ransack to search for a file name, the rate is not that high. The SSD might be 10x faster than the hard drive, when looking at file names. The operating system does not use the System File Cache properly. There are *many* opportunities to consult previous reads of a file stored in RAM, where the OS goes right ahead and insists on reading the hard drive again. This is known as an "uncached file system call", uncached on purpose for unknown reasons. While running uncached occasionally makes sense, these OSes are a lot less well tuned than Win2K was. I haven't actually benched sequential performance on the SSD drive yet. I'm sure it'll do 500MB/sec on a SATA III port. You have SATA III ports on your motherboard, so you are all set. But I'd still study the situation with Task Manager, before running off half-cut. Both the SSD and the RAM are not that expensive, relatively speaking. RAM has come down in price. So you can certainly speculatively install them. But I don't know how much it would bother you, if there was absolutely no improvement after the upgrade was complete. If you value your time, it'll take time to clone over the HDD to the SSD, as well as time to make the new memory setup error-free. Here's an example of a small SSD. Relatively good reviews so far. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147360 A measure of goodness, is the "Terabyte-Writes" rating or TBW. The last page of the spec lists it as 150TBW. You can try comparing that figure, from one drive to another. An Enterprise class drive would have a higher number. http://www.samsung.com/us/system/con...6bw/850PRO.pdf If I compare to an Enterprise drive, this one is "Endurance Rating (Lifetime Writes) 16.9PB", which means the entire drive can be written about 16000 times. The other one, about 600 times. http://ark.intel.com/products/84239/...-6Gbs-20nm-MLC Another example. http://thessdguy.com/comparing-dwpd-to-tbw/ You should plan for regular backups of the SSD. Your computer should be on a UPS, for best data safely. If a single computer is on a UPS, you can hook the "shutdown cable" from the UPS to the computer, and even have the computer shut down when you are not in the room. Paul |
How much memory is "useful"
On Fri, 08 Jul 2016 12:37:31 -0400, Paul wrote:
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote: My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8 database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program. Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk access or limited memory was slowing down things? At the moment, we don't know what OS you use. The Task Manager interface varies a bit between OSes. I expect you have a 64 bit OS, later than WinXP. ******* The Task Manager (and a button on it that launches Resource Monitor), provide feedback on how things are going. I would start there. At the moment, you have "the perfect amount of RAM", so I would need conclusive evidence from your research, to recommend even more of it. When you have tons of RAM, it takes a while to fill it. So an operation you thought might take "a second", well, it takes 25 seconds on a machine full of RAM. Some programs only fill RAM at around 1GB/sec, even though the STREAM benchmark runs at 17GB/sec. Using one stick of RAM per channel, allows using XMP RAM (automatic setup), saving a lot of messing about. When you install a total of four sticks, the tuning process will require more of your time, to ensure it is error free. XMP typically supports two sticks total with Command Rate 1T, or two sticks total with Command Rate 2T. Since only 2T makes any sense, the first profile is a waste of your time. While I have heard rumors of XMP with a profile for 2 sticks and the other profile is for 4 sticks, I certainly don't own any of that. So I have to adjust tCAS, memory clock, Vnb, or whatever, all by myself when I have four sticks. Um, what fun. The last time, it took me two days, because I did it wrong the first time. ******* In Task Manager, you'll be looking at the "percentage of disk I/O" being used, to see if the disk is so slow as to be holding things up. If doing a database lookup causes the disk to go to 100% I/O, that would be a sign an SSD could help. If you look at the RAM in Task Manager, and all 16GB is used, and the system is paging (hard fault indicator indicates hundred of hard faults per second), then maybe I might be convinced more RAM would help. ******* I have a machine with a ****load of RAM (64GB). I'm not impressed. So many things have been slower than they should be, the list would take forever to type out. I just bought an SSD a couple days ago. But, I put it on a slow computer. I'm kinda impressed, but I still see file system searches to be slow. The SSD might be capable of 100,000 IO operations per second or so, and yet if I use Agent Ransack to search for a file name, the rate is not that high. The SSD might be 10x faster than the hard drive, when looking at file names. The operating system does not use the System File Cache properly. There are *many* opportunities to consult previous reads of a file stored in RAM, where the OS goes right ahead and insists on reading the hard drive again. This is known as an "uncached file system call", uncached on purpose for unknown reasons. While running uncached occasionally makes sense, these OSes are a lot less well tuned than Win2K was. I haven't actually benched sequential performance on the SSD drive yet. I'm sure it'll do 500MB/sec on a SATA III port. You have SATA III ports on your motherboard, so you are all set. But I'd still study the situation with Task Manager, before running off half-cut. Both the SSD and the RAM are not that expensive, relatively speaking. RAM has come down in price. So you can certainly speculatively install them. But I don't know how much it would bother you, if there was absolutely no improvement after the upgrade was complete. If you value your time, it'll take time to clone over the HDD to the SSD, as well as time to make the new memory setup error-free. Here's an example of a small SSD. Relatively good reviews so far. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820147360 A measure of goodness, is the "Terabyte-Writes" rating or TBW. The last page of the spec lists it as 150TBW. You can try comparing that figure, from one drive to another. An Enterprise class drive would have a higher number. http://www.samsung.com/us/system/con...6bw/850PRO.pdf If I compare to an Enterprise drive, this one is "Endurance Rating (Lifetime Writes) 16.9PB", which means the entire drive can be written about 16000 times. The other one, about 600 times. http://ark.intel.com/products/84239/...-6Gbs-20nm-MLC Another example. http://thessdguy.com/comparing-dwpd-to-tbw/ You should plan for regular backups of the SSD. Your computer should be on a UPS, for best data safely. If a single computer is on a UPS, you can hook the "shutdown cable" from the UPS to the computer, and even have the computer shut down when you are not in the room. Paul Great comments Paul.... To answer a few questions you made about details I left out... The OS was originally Win 7 64 bit Pro, now Win 10... took the plunge and upgraded. The computer is on a UPS... AC power out here in the country is far from consistant, so virtually everything electronic is on a UPS (3 computers and 2 Dish network DVRs, each on it's own UPS) My "C" drive is a SSD and all the data is on a couple of 7200 RPM SATA drives. I was wondering if putting the large database files on an SSD might speed things. These are large files for a home computer, 2.9 GB, 2.7 GB, 1.5 GB, etc. these are FileMaker Pro files, converted from Access when the file size became too large for Access to handle. The ones under 1 GB are all on MS Access. All of these as very simple "flat" files, no complicated relationships. Based on what you've said so far, I'm thinking that adding more memory might not be the way I want to proceed.... I don't need the hassle of trying to tune the memory, whereas adding an SSD for the data would be really easy to implement. |
How much memory is "useful"
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8 database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program. Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk access or limited memory was slowing down things? Open Task Manager and look under Performance to see how much memory you are using. Yes SSD's are fast. You should use an SSD for your primary drive. |
How much memory is "useful"
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
Great comments Paul.... To answer a few questions you made about details I left out... The OS was originally Win 7 64 bit Pro, now Win 10... took the plunge and upgraded. The computer is on a UPS... AC power out here in the country is far from consistant, so virtually everything electronic is on a UPS (3 computers and 2 Dish network DVRs, each on it's own UPS) My "C" drive is a SSD and all the data is on a couple of 7200 RPM SATA drives. I was wondering if putting the large database files on an SSD might speed things. These are large files for a home computer, 2.9 GB, 2.7 GB, 1.5 GB, etc. these are FileMaker Pro files, converted from Access when the file size became too large for Access to handle. The ones under 1 GB are all on MS Access. All of these as very simple "flat" files, no complicated relationships. Based on what you've said so far, I'm thinking that adding more memory might not be the way I want to proceed.... I don't need the hassle of trying to tune the memory, whereas adding an SSD for the data would be really easy to implement. I think moving the database files to the SSD is a great first choice in experiments. As long as the operations do mostly reads, and sparse writes, everything should be fine, and you'll get any speed boost that better I/O could provide. ******* A more complicated experiment would be: 1) Buy a pair of DIMMs exactly like the ones you've got. Another set of 2x8GB should not cost a lot today. 2) Do the tweaking and tuning, until memtest86+ and prime95 torture test (or any other tester that is known to be good at certifying the memory) say the new setup is error free. 3) Install this, buy a license, and set the size to 16GB. Thus, the newly installed RAM becomes a very fast RAMdisk. Load the database files onto it. http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk That product can write out the RAM contents at shutdown, but you also have the option during the day, of doing anything else you might like. Like, exit the database softwares (so no files are busy or half-written), run a copy of Macrium Reflect Free and make a backup. And so on. You can backup and restore to the RAMDisk, because it behaves like a block device. Only certain softwares, like perhaps older Partition Managers, do not like the declared CHS geometry. RAMDisks are not perfect emulations of SATA drives or anything. My experience with the RAMDisk, is it might be twice as good at the best of times. But not all operations benefit equally. To give an example, when I ran my JKDefrag tests, and loaded the RAMDisk with the C: partition from a real computer, one kind of defrag when hosted in RAM, only did 1.5MB/sec. Terrible performance. And another kind (defrag only, no optimize), ran at 1GB/sec, and the disk was defragmented in a matter of just ten seconds. It is the nature of the uneven performance, that makes these RAMDisks such a loser. I cannot predict what is going to happen. The same thing happened with running VMs stored on the VHD file - VirtualBox ran no faster, I was still seeing occasional 1.5MB/sec disk I/O to the RAMDisk. So I have to mention this option for completeness, but it's sheer lunacy with "real data" on it. If one of my experiments runs amok here, nothing of value gets lost :-) If yet another VM crashes and burns here, nobody (not even me), cares. Paul |
How much memory is "useful"
On Fri, 08 Jul 2016 09:16:33 -0500, Charlie Hoffpauir
wrote: My system is a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK board with 2 8GB DDR3 G SKILL memory strips (16 GB total) and an Intel i5-4690 processor, set up with two 24" monitors. I do a lot of genealogy work, and often have 8 database programs open at the same time, constantly switching between them or copying information from one or more to my genealogy program. Would more memory improve performance, or would having the database programs running on a SSD be more effective? How could I tell if disk access or limited memory was slowing down things? Four processors in your quad configuration is likely less indicative of adding more memory, than a derivatives six or more cores. Ideally. Personally, I might first wonder of a tradeoff based on my current configuration after updating cores several times. I'd say I've realized an additional 30 degrees Fahrenheit, reported as indicative of the MB being "maxed out " with the last purchased update, a quad core. That being an AMD, however, and not necessarily a correct supposition, heat as per se an environ expect of one provided by a MB running an Intel, say were it a posit placed for similar core-to-performance scenario. Once a build is settled and optimized with a modicum of reason provided a given CPU, afterthoughts to a supportive role for further augmenting the system are generally of magnitudes of lesser significance, generally acceded for marginally impacting overall performance based on an initial thematic choice given performance to rate matrices for the CPU. The exception being SDDs introduced, of course having benefited all alike across an operable board of PC platforms indiscriminately. |
How much memory is "useful"
On Sat, 09 Jul 2016 02:21:46 -0400, Paul wrote:
Charlie Hoffpauir wrote: Great comments Paul.... To answer a few questions you made about details I left out... The OS was originally Win 7 64 bit Pro, now Win 10... took the plunge and upgraded. The computer is on a UPS... AC power out here in the country is far from consistant, so virtually everything electronic is on a UPS (3 computers and 2 Dish network DVRs, each on it's own UPS) My "C" drive is a SSD and all the data is on a couple of 7200 RPM SATA drives. I was wondering if putting the large database files on an SSD might speed things. These are large files for a home computer, 2.9 GB, 2.7 GB, 1.5 GB, etc. these are FileMaker Pro files, converted from Access when the file size became too large for Access to handle. The ones under 1 GB are all on MS Access. All of these as very simple "flat" files, no complicated relationships. Based on what you've said so far, I'm thinking that adding more memory might not be the way I want to proceed.... I don't need the hassle of trying to tune the memory, whereas adding an SSD for the data would be really easy to implement. I think moving the database files to the SSD is a great first choice in experiments. As long as the operations do mostly reads, and sparse writes, everything should be fine, and you'll get any speed boost that better I/O could provide. ******* A more complicated experiment would be: 1) Buy a pair of DIMMs exactly like the ones you've got. Another set of 2x8GB should not cost a lot today. 2) Do the tweaking and tuning, until memtest86+ and prime95 torture test (or any other tester that is known to be good at certifying the memory) say the new setup is error free. 3) Install this, buy a license, and set the size to 16GB. Thus, the newly installed RAM becomes a very fast RAMdisk. Load the database files onto it. http://memory.dataram.com/products-a...ftware/ramdisk That product can write out the RAM contents at shutdown, but you also have the option during the day, of doing anything else you might like. Like, exit the database softwares (so no files are busy or half-written), run a copy of Macrium Reflect Free and make a backup. And so on. You can backup and restore to the RAMDisk, because it behaves like a block device. Only certain softwares, like perhaps older Partition Managers, do not like the declared CHS geometry. RAMDisks are not perfect emulations of SATA drives or anything. My experience with the RAMDisk, is it might be twice as good at the best of times. But not all operations benefit equally. To give an example, when I ran my JKDefrag tests, and loaded the RAMDisk with the C: partition from a real computer, one kind of defrag when hosted in RAM, only did 1.5MB/sec. Terrible performance. And another kind (defrag only, no optimize), ran at 1GB/sec, and the disk was defragmented in a matter of just ten seconds. It is the nature of the uneven performance, that makes these RAMDisks such a loser. I cannot predict what is going to happen. The same thing happened with running VMs stored on the VHD file - VirtualBox ran no faster, I was still seeing occasional 1.5MB/sec disk I/O to the RAMDisk. So I have to mention this option for completeness, but it's sheer lunacy with "real data" on it. If one of my experiments runs amok here, nothing of value gets lost :-) If yet another VM crashes and burns here, nobody (not even me), cares. Paul I feel strangely compelled to try this RAMDisk thing. I did try putting some of the data files on a small, old SSD that I had (OCZ Vertex 2, SATA II) and if there was any speed improvement, it wasn't enough to be noticable. My database queries are usually fairly simple, looking of combinations of husband and wife's surnames, for example. Maybe for more complicated queries there would be more of an improvement. |
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