Memory and Diminishing Retns

A few yrs. back before W2k/XP it was a general rule from bench testers that W98 would effectively 2X it's speed if you went from 64Meg to 128Meg of RAM. You could get faster with more RAM, but that seemed to be the pt. of diminishing returns. I was just wondering the other day if such a test had been done on W2k/XP, and what the results were with a P4 M'bd.

Thanks,
G.P.Lea

 

With XP the minimum to run the OS and some apps. is 256MB. going to 512 will give you probably a speed jump of (and I'm generalising here!) 10-25%+ improvement. Above 512 to will only give the average user at best a few percent improvement. Dual channel memory may increase overall performance by 2-3% as well.
Due to the vast differences in hardware and software configuration it is difficult to be more exact.
Loading up your system with more than 1Gig is pretty much unnecessary exept for running MANY apps. But under normal use you don't need a plethora of applications running.
W2K requirements are similar, but a bit less than for XP.
Diminishing returns can actually become negative returns in certain situations of hardware configuration and memory management. But generally this will be for memory of above 1Gig.

 

Just a quick note to say that the above is when you are dealing with 2K pro rather than the server version where the whole situation depends on what server OS version, how many processors, and what the server is doing for a living.