Huh. If more RAM doesn't actually make you faster, why does it seem like more RAM = more speed? What benefit does RAM actually give you?
Well, you'd have to tell me exactly what scenario you're thinking of, where you think
more RAM = more speed. IMHO that's a little too vague to serve as a useful starting point for a discussion.
I understand why xandros is resisting the idea that more RAM can't make anything actually run faster. I think our disagreement might be just about what the most correct way to think about RAM is, rather than anything else. If you're just looking for a simple "recipe" rather than a real understanding of the issue, I'd say you should at least reverse and slightly adjust that sentence like so: "
not enough (note that is not the opposite of "more") RAM can make things run slower".
More correct, but also more abstract, is what I said in my first post: Increasing RAM capacity can, as far as performance is concerned, never achieve more than to allow a computing device to sometimes get away with doing less. Imagine two office workers at a desk, each with a stack of envelopes in front of them. Their job is to stick a postage stamp on every envelop. Both of them work exactly at the same pace, say 15 envelopes per minute (the CPU). However, one has only 30 envelopes while the other has 200. Obviously the one with 30 envelopes will finish earlier. Would you find it correct to say that the one with 30 envelopes worked faster? Obviously not. Claiming that more RAM makes a computing device run faster is wrong in exactly the same way.
One example:
Think of how
Windows memory paging works (I think this is similar to the analogy that xandros9 was making above). If your computer doesn't have enough RAM to accommodate all the programs and data you are working with, Windows will be forced to write the contents of some of that memory out to secondary storage (HDD, SDD, etc). If you then do something that accesses that memory, that data must be read back into main memory and other contents in RAM swapped out in exchange. This is of course excruciatingly slow compared to just having everything in RAM, so you might be tempted to say more RAM makes things faster. This is incorrect for two reasons:
- it's not having more RAM that is making anything run faster, but not having enough RAM that is requiring the computer to do more(swap memory pages to secondary storage), and hence run slower.
- once you have enough RAM to accommodate all your programs and data, adding more RAM won't do anything for you. If all your programs and data fit into 3GB of memory, a device with 4GB or 1024GB of RAM will exhibit exactly the same performance. Zero difference.
Particularly that second point highlights why it's incorrect to think that more RAM = "more speed". The only time that is ever correct, is when you didn't have enough RAM to begin with.
The resuming message we often see on WP is conceptually similar to the above. In this case the OS is just swapping out entire apps rather than individual memory pages. On WP the number of simultaneously opened apps is limited to 9 (or fewer on 512MB devices). If MS were to remove that limit, and build a device with 200GB of RAM, what would you expect the difference to be? Assuming all of your apps would fit into those 200 GB of RAM (they very likely would), then you'd see the loading message only once, when an app is first launched. You' never see the resuming message. Here too we might be tempted to say such a WP device "runs faster". In a way it does, but in reality it's just doing less, just like the office worker with the stamps. More importantly, everything else would perform exactly the same as it performs now. Not a single app would actually do anything faster than it does on an otherwise comparable 1GB device.
Saying that more RAM makes our devices faster would only be correct if every MB we added to a device had some measureable affect on performance. In an infinite number of configurations it will do nothing of the sort. It's only in a handful of situations (when we had too little RAM to begin with) that it will.
Don't misunderstand this as an argument along the lines of "we don't need more RAM". As long as the OS has a way of using it (less resuming) and provides some of that extra memory to apps (for higher resolution textures in games, or just generally larger and more comprehensive programs/apps), then that's definitely a good thing. It's just not correct to think of RAM as primarily or generally related to performance.
From a developers point of view this is all a bit different, but I don't think that's relevant here.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram