Limitation on RAM?!?

[johnieutah]

Hi, need some RAM upgrade advice.

 

I use my Unraid box as a music/video server as well as of course for it's great RAID facilities.  Currently I have 1GB RAM and a dual core AMD processor.  Is there a limit on the amount of RAM that Unraid will see (like with Windows 32bit)??  Specifically I'm running Squeezebox server which can be quite processor intensive IMO, so I'd like to bump the RAM up.  Is there any point sticking another 4GB in there or would another 2GB suffice?

 

Also, slightly on topic, what's happened with RAM prices?  I'm sure when I looked a couple of years ago they were cheaper than they are now!    Crucial are quoting ~€50 for 2 x 1 GB sticks!  Seems like a lot.

 

Thanks, Matt.

[NAS]

Unraid will use up to 4GB as you would expect. It will also use more than 4GB but in a specific way thats slightly less efficient.

 

Realistically I would go for 3-4GB. Thats alot of ram in context

 

RAM prices are silly now. There are lots of news items why but behind it all is global monopoly, obfuscation of the truth, raw component shortages and a conspiracy that makes new models of RAM available what seems every month.

 

4GB cheap ram.

 

Im sure others will have stronger opinions.

[Joe L.]

Hi, need some RAM upgrade advice.

 

I use my Unraid box as a music/video server as well as of course for it's great RAID facilities.  Currently I have 1GB RAM and a dual core AMD processor.  Is there a limit on the amount of RAM that Unraid will see (like with Windows 32bit)??  Specifically I'm running Squeezebox server which can be quite processor intensive IMO, so I'd like to bump the RAM up.  Is there any point sticking another 4GB in there or would another 2GB suffice?

 

Also, slightly on topic, what's happened with RAM prices?  I'm sure when I looked a couple of years ago they were cheaper than they are now!    Crucial are quoting ~€50 for 2 x 1 GB sticks!  Seems like a lot.

 

Thanks, Matt.

The additional RAM may have no impact at all unless you are currently crashing with out-of-memory issues as the cause.

As you said, you are "processor intensive", so a dual/quad core cpu for your motherboard would do more to help than more memory.

 

Unlike windows, and most linux systems, unRAID has no "swap" space allocated.  Therefore everything must be in memory at the same time.  (if it had a swap space, it could swap out processes that were idle)  The task of swapping processes to and from the swap space on disk is what slows down windows terribly, and linux systems too, if they run out of RAM space to hold everything at once.  Since unRAID has no swap space, its kernel out-of-memory process will kill/terminate programs that are idle the longest in an attempt to free enough memory for those that are active.

 

With that in mind, you can add as much memory as your motherboard will support.  unRAID will use it.  You are not limited to 1GB or 4GB, or 8GB.  (The actual limit is 64GB, as unRAID has the Physical-Address-Extension (PAE) feature enabled in its kernel)

 

And yes, RAM prices have gone way up this past year, although they are starting to come back down.

[jupilerman]

If you intend to use some ad-ons likes vmware, you will need that extra RAM.

I did test vmware with 1Gb and a single core : not very efficient. vmware craches offten.

But with 4 GB and 4 cores, no more bad behaviors.

I did test it with 8 Gb ans I could launch 3-4 VM in the same time without any issues.

 

 

[NAS]

The additional RAM may have no impact at all unless you are currently crashing with out-of-memory issues as the cause.

 

I understand why you said that but it is not 100% correct. Additional RAM will be used and more will be kept in RAM for longer. The macro effect of this is that disks will spin up less and videos can sometime be resumed instantly without waiting for disks to spin up.

 

This is the immediate impact of what happened to me when I increased RAM. It was very noticable and I had seen no crash issues prior to the RAM upgrade.

[queeg]

One reason for the higher ram prices is the phasing out of DDR2 and phasing in DDR3.  As more DDR3 sells it will come down some in price.  DDR2 will rise as stocks of it get consumed. 

Another reason is who has control of the memory.  Apple products now control around 20% of the world supply of memory. 

 

 

 

 

[johnieutah]

I'll hold off for the time being, I'm not experiencing any system crashes or anything, just want to see if it'll improve the Squeezebox performance at all.

 

Can I use DDR3 in a DDR2 system?

 

Thanks.

 

 

[BRiT]

No. DDR1 to DDR1, DDR2 to DDR2, DDR3 to DDR3. None are backwards compatible.

[WeeboTech]

How much ram is in your system now?

 

It all depends on how much you use your system and how busy it is.

Going to 8GB when I had rtorrent and allot of downlods/seeds did help a great deal.

For a music/video server, 4GB is plenty.