Hi,
I am thinking about doing an upgrade on my laptop in order to get Darktable to run faster. I have a limited budget, so I will either buy an SSD for my OS (Linux Mint) and apps or double my RAM from 8 to 16 GB. Which alternative do you think would give me the best performance in Darktable? My CPU is an Intel i5-4210M and I have a 1 TB HDD @5400 rpm. Note that I will not be able to buy an SSD big enough to store everything on it.
Maybe you should think about the graphics card first.
Since this is a laptop (as I clearly stated in my post) I don’t think that would be possible.
Can you add the SSD without throwing out the HDD? And, perhaps, how large are your raw files?
Yes, there is room for an extra drive. And my raw files are around 20 to 30
MB, 18 Mpix.
SSD for sure! You’ll be amazed at how fast everything is. 8gb ram should be sufficient, as long as you don’t have a bunch of other applications open.
Since I always have a browser window open, which consumes a lot of memory, I feel different: I would go for the RAM, since this is a limiting factor for me, and unfortunately my notebook (Lenovo X240) does not allow more than 8 GB. However, I have a little M.2-SSD (only 64 GB) for the OS, which was pretty cheap and is incredibly fast. With such a thing, maybe both together could fit into your budget, even a SSD with less than 64 GB could be sufficient, my OS never consumed more than 1/3 of the 64 GB available. 32 GB are available starting from around 20 €, 64 GB from around 35 € (the two I checked were both from Transcend).
I also think that a modest combination of both should do the best. Perhaps I would monitor for a while, how much RAM darktable is currently using.
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Honestly, going from a 5400rpm laptop hdd to an ssd will likely be the best option (you’ll also feel like you’re driving a race car). Maybe we can get a darktable dev like @houz to weigh in.
Thanks for the input, you’re right, I might be able to squeeze in both if I go for a small SSD.
Are you sure? I have an X230 with 16GB.
I guess it depends on what darktable is used for most of the time. If almost all time is spent in darkroom then the SSD won’t bring any benefit (well, boot times are slightly smaller and applications load a tad faster, but it’s nothing to get excited about as it’s a one time thing). If you are browsing through your collection constantly, collecting images by various keys, … then the SSD will make a difference – at least that’s what I noticed when adding an SSD for my home partition a while ago. If the SSD is going to host the system files instead of your data then the boot time and similar are noticeably better, but that’s still nothing helping once darktable is started.
So what would I go for? Hard to tell. I can’t remember if I ever used more than 8GB of memory on this laptop when using darktable so it might be worth running htop in the background while using darktable and having an eye on it every now and then, during lighttable use, when in darkroom and while exporting. Should you notice that memory isn’t a limit then go for the SSD. If you find that your system is swapping then buy the RAM.
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Thanks a lot, this makes perfect sense. I spend most of the time in Darkroom, not so much in Lighttable.
Unfortunately, yes. Only 1 slot available and up to 8 GB per slot (Haswell). This was one of these downgrades that really put a serious crack into my demand for lenovo equipment. The screen was the second one. Nominally, it’s an upgrade (1920×1080) compared to my x61s (1024×768), but it shows ghost pictures like in the old days with CRTs used without screen saver 
. And it was already replaced for that reason, with new ghost pictures the same day.
Bummer.
That seems to be normal, at least for some models. My X230 has the same problem. I didn’t have that on the R and T models I had before. Ever since Lenovo took over the Thinkpads the quality went down a lot (the plastics on my X also crack in all kind of places) and I am not sure if my next laptop will be a Thinkpad again. But we digress. 
Hm, at work I got a dell, and it’s different, but not better 
.
If you frequently run out of memory, get the memory. If your workflow fits into the 8gb you have more won’t help much.
There are some minor benefits with having more spare memory related to less fragmentation and more left for caches.
An SSD is generally really nice to have. IO bound operations are going to be a lot faster (for instance application startup times, dealing with large files). In some cases (like random reads) an SSD is 1000x faster than a spinning disk. For typical desktop workloads the benefits are of course a lot smaller.
But if your goal is as you stated to make darktable faster then the benefits of both of these are probably going to be marginal.
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I knew you were not going to like my answer. Yes I agree with everyone that a SSD would speed up any process that involves read/writes to the disk. But I don’t think it will speedup computational complex graphics routines. I have a notebook without a graphics card and a desktop with a graphics card and doing a gmic filter on the notebook can take ages but only a few blinks on the desktop. P.S. I too plan on getting an SSD for my notebook, maybe on black friday from Amazon. See you in line!
I can’t believe that
According to my System Monitor I have plenty of memory. In a normal scenario with Darktable open and also Chrome with a couple of tabs I seem to use around 2.5 GB. Even with Chrome, Darktable, Gimp with several layers of 16 bit tif and Nik Color Efex Pro open at he same time I didn’t go over 4.5 GB used. So I won’t get more memory now. I bought an SSD, though, next step is to see how that goes.
I both read and hear a lot in various podcasts about how it is recommended to have 16 GB of memory to get Lightroom to run as fast as possible, I wonder why the same does not appply to Darktable. It seems that LR users that upgrade from 8 to 16 GB experience a massive increase in performance.