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My understanding is that once you use all your RAM, your PC will start using parts of the hard drive for temporary RAM and this is what slows your PC.

Say someone's PC has 4GB of RAM, but they never use more than 3GB, will they ever notice a speed increase if they install more RAM?

*I've seen threads with a similar question, but no direct answer.

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  • It sounds as if you need to research 32 bit/ 64 bit systems.
    – Xavierjazz
    Jan 15, 2017 at 1:11
  • If the programs you normally run do not consume more then 4GB then there isn't a point in adding more. Questions seeking our opinion are really not on topic. There are plenty of questions, that currently, answer your underline question.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 15, 2017 at 1:14
  • @JustBeCoo. As is often the case things are more complicated than that. To start you need to see how much RAM is really being used. You need to check free memory, not the memory gauge. If free memory ever reaches a low value you are in a position where the memory manager is being constrained by resources. The potential exists if there were more RAM it could provide better performance. Of course whether you would notice the difference is another matter.
    – LMiller7
    Jan 15, 2017 at 2:38

5 Answers 5

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Practically it might depending on the operating system.

When faced with insufficient memory, systems page out to a pagefile or swap. When faced with excess memory, a clever system caches.

Free memory is wasted memory. However you want a good amount on standby. rather than in use. Being out of memory is terrible.

In the case of windows enter image description here

The system has minimal free memory. This is good. It also vaguely shows what happens when you have more ram than you need.

Lets go deeper and fire up rammap

enter image description here

Half my standby seems to be one of my backups, which is a little strange. Other than that though, if I needed to load but not modify any of these files. I see things like drivers, and things that seem related to my system tray. Anything you're likely to read often and write little, like DLLs will benefit from caching.

So, yes, up till a point you would see an improvement with spare ram your system can access. How much headroom you need depends on what you do - I have extra ram since I sometimes run VMs on my system. I wouldn't go 8gb on a 32 bit system.

I'd also say overall performance depends on the system as a whole. All things kept the same, you're going to see better performance on identical systems with fast storage like an SSD over a slower hard drive, and on what you do. However a sensibly excessive amount of ram, taking into account things like paired sticks (for dual channel) is never ever a bad thing.

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  • Yup, pagefile or virtual memory on SSD rather than HDD is better way to make your computer more responsive than RAM memory... I said this elsewhere here.. Feb 16 at 16:56
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This depends on how much MORE ram you have left. If you have only 10 megabytes left of RAM, chances are it will run very slow. However if you have a GB left it will run fine. So to answer your question on "Does more RAM speed up your computer" Well if you are only running simple applications like Wordpad Notepad or any writing processor, etc. As long as your not using over half of your RAM it will run very smooth. So if your not using anything or multiple things that uses most of your RAM, then you don't need to upgrade it.

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The correct answer depends on a variety of factors.

First of all, the question didn't specify an operating system. You are likely to have significant differences between MS-DOS and Windows 10 and Mac OS X and other platforms.

Second of all, even if you are using a newer operating system, the answer would depend on what software you use. Specifically, how that software was designed to use memory.

I choose now to refer to David Schwartz's answer to user1306322's SuperUser.com question about disabling swap as an example. That discussion was actually more about page files, but the point is that software may ask for the operating system to "commit" to a certain amount of memory (which may be RAM, or may be in a page file). So, even if the physical memory isn't actively being used to store data (yet), memory can be reserved based on a software's request that indicates that the software might be needing that memory.

If software is doing that, then having physical memory could potentially provide some benefit, even if no software is keeping track of the data in that memory at the current time.

Then again, I'm pretty sure that older operating systems had simpler capabilities, and even if you use modern software, there are multiple operating systems to choose from. That is why the short and accurate answer is saying, "it depends".

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That may not be the proper question... the question might rather be "what can I best do to speed up my computer"... and the usual answer is SSD is #1, ram is maybe #2... point is, Given any computer the best way to optimize or speed it up is just to put and SSD in it.

If you already have an SSD only then would I consider ram or anything else, but RAM would probably be #2 but it may not make as much of a difference -- I'm using 6.2GB of 8GB and 4.7GB was chrome... I closed half the windows and chrome is till using 4.0GB. Of course I may not have used or accessed most of the windows today.

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  • I was asking not to speed up my PC, but to learn more about memory usage, thank you for the suggestion though!
    – kebab-case
    Jan 15, 2017 at 4:02
  • as SSD/HDD is virtual memory and you were asking about memory I feel my answer was better than anything else here and doesn't deserve a downtick. I still see it as best memory answer here. Reread and reapply, it is now canon... nobody has hdd. Feb 16 at 16:49
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Your system, overall, can run somewhat faster because any "extra" memory on linux and many other OS's can be used as cache-memory for your disk. I.e. every time you access your disk it will read the stuff you used into memory. If you have enough memory, eventually all of your frequently used programs will be sitting in memory waiting to be used. At any time, if a program needs more memory than is immediately available, the OS will let go of cache memory -- usually the stuff that was accessed the longest time ago. It happens automatically.

Example - my server usually doesn't need more than 10-15GB to run all its programs, and the rest of the memory ~70+GB, gradually** fills up with cached data from the file system, so if I use any of the same things from disk, it can save time by using the memory copy. But if I run a prog needing 50G, the OS will immediately free up however much I need to run the program, as running programs usually have memory priority over file system cache.

It's not guaranteed to make any single thing faster, because whatever files you access may not be in memory when you need them, but its one of those "on the average" type things.

Note: Windows does caching as well, but marks it as 'free' --- but reclaimable if the OS can use what is in the memory (file system data, for example).

As for how much speedup you'll see -- it depends on how often your usage will fetch things from ram vs. disk.

**-- above I said "gradually" -- my linux system is usually up for weeks at a time, so stuff gradually is read into memory over the time it is up. Currently been up for 29 days.

If you turn your computer off every night or it's a portable, then you are not as likely to benefit by file data being cached in memory.

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