David H. Lipman wrote:

Um...that's a problem with Winx/ME only.

[...]

Now do you have a "REAL" example ?

Depending on how good your memory managers are, there are longer linked lists to churn through as you get more pages of memory to play with. Linux Kernel 2.6 has only just now got reversed linked lists to speed up swapping shared pages. I very much doubt certain other OSes are speedy about such things...

(And some OSes/versions can't even address 1GByte.)

Then, on the hardware side of things, some PC motherboards only support cache for a limited address space. Add more RAM than the cache can address and your extra RAM is used uncached (very slow).

Also, if you've tweaked your RAM timings for minimum delays, then the extra RAM can force you to slow those timings back.

... And you can pedantically contrive any arguments you wish.


To use an old phrase:
"Horses for courses."

For the CPU bound task s@h, above about 16MB of free RAM gains you virtually nothing.

Other tasks only gain an advantage if they can usefully use that RAM. Otherwise, you just have a very expensive poorly utilised disk cache.

With present Windoze bloat, about 256MB to 512MB is a reasonable expense. Anything more, unless you have specific requirements, is an unbalanced extravagance in my opinion.


Have fun,
Martin