Curse

wafflesrok · Jul 26, 2006, 02:02 AM // 02:02

Alright so people told me to upgrade my RAM to two 512s. So I was like cool and about to go buy them when someone told me about "bottleneck" What is that?

I have a gateway MX3230 with 256 RAM and a intel celeron 1.5ghz processor. I got it recently and i dont want to replace it.

Kaguya · Jul 26, 2006, 07:17 AM // 07:17

Bottleneck is quite common term.

Just like a bottle, it is much thicker from the bottom, then getting thinner and thinner to the top, so when you pour the bottle, all the stuff doesn't come out at once.

In computing, it is bit similar. You have, say, a brand new GF7900 for a vidcard, but the processor is some old 1GHz chip. The bottleneck in this case is the processor, it will hold the vidcard back since it's so slow, making the vidcard function much slower as well. In ideal computer, there isn't any bottlenecks, any of the parts won't make the other parts function any slower.

I don't see, tho, why upgrading from 256MB to 1024MB would cause any bottlenecks, unless they ment memory speed, which isn't that big of an issue. More memory is more memory, simple as that. Only way it can cause any bottlenecks is, as I said, it's "slow". But that new memory won't be any slower than the old ones so it's not an issue at all.

mrcake · Jul 26, 2006, 09:10 AM // 09:10

who ever told you probably was thinking of faster ram which on that system wouldnt make any diffrence as the bottleneck would be that the cpu cant use the ram at a higher speed.

Dark Dragon · Jul 26, 2006, 09:45 AM // 09:45

I think i was the one talking about "faster" ram, but i think it was a interpretation error.

I was talking about techlology advancment and how ram access speed/read write etc hasn't increased that much with respect to proccessor speed, which in turn cause the most commen bottleneck within a system.

An increase in ram would improve system performance as there is more space to store temporary data, which is accessed much faster than a hard drive.

With less ram memory is often "swaped" or "switched" which further reduces performace. with swapping and switching i mean the data within your ram is copied to your hard drive so your proccessor can proccess the current task and then swap the data back to perform previous task.

with less ram data has to be constantly swaped and therefore causes a huge slowdown and lowwer performance. More ram means less swaping and therefore an improvment to performance.

hope that wasn't to long winded