Anyone using four DDR4 RAM sticks and darktable?

Hardware
1

I presently have 2 * 8 gig RAM sticks in my computer, and wonder whether I would benefit from adding 2 additional 8 gig sticks (of the same make).

If you have a RAM setup consisting of 4 * something, and use darktable, would you have the time to perform this little experiment?

See darktable speed (in general, and when using two monitors) - #24 by aadm

Please perform both tests
a) using all four of your RAM sticks
b) using just two of your RAM sticks
(observing proper slots for the 2-set, of course).

Sincerely,
Claes in Lund, Sweden

2

Is it a question of whether to buy or not? I am a newbie in hardware but wouldn’t it also depend on the rest of the hardware; e.g., motherboard, CPU and PSU?

3

Since the beginning of computing time, more ram = more better!

1 Like
4

More never hurts but the question might be faster by how much?.

5

16GB of ram should be plenty, but you can find out by checking how much swap is being used.

First, tell your system to only use swap when needed: reboot, then open a terminal and do this:

$ sudo echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Then open Darktable and start using it, and type free into the terminal.

If the amount of used swap is large (say more than 15% of total swap), then adding more RAM will help. If the amount of used swap is smaller than 15%, adding more RAM won’t make your system faster.

2 Likes
6

A while back, when I read about swappiness, there seemed to be some debate over how meaningful it is as an indicator of memory management. Anyway, no harm in trying. BTW, I only have 4 GB. :persevere:

7

4 → 8Gb HUGE difference
8 → 16Gb Little bit better for me, but I have always 20 Chrome tabs open, FF, + + +
16 → 32Gb I doubt you will notice much difference

Sometimes I do a bit with Blender, more GPU would be more interesting to me. None currently.

1 Like
8

Thank you. I just performed the test.
Result: Swap used = 0

9

What if you have only two channels?

It will hardly make a difference unless you have quad channel ram.

That said, I haven’t seen much difference when running my ram at 3200 vs 2666 or whatever with Filmulator, so I’ve been running it at stock.

10

As I’ve been discussing about this with @Claes also via email, I did the test yesterday and removed two of my four 8GB sticks.

Guess what… Regardless of dt 2.6.2 or git-master, the test acc to this below thread was 3.3% (0.5 s) slower with 32GB compared to 16GB when it comes to CPU only (opencl no effected). This can only be explained with overhead for the mem management.

dt-speed discussions

At the moment my ram is 2133MHz and hence the bottleneck to the 2666MHz spec of my Core i9. As ram prices dropped, so I’ll get my 32GB 3666MHz next week. Will I be too lazy to repeat that test? Don’t know yet :smile: