F@H and RAM

[BaLa]

this has prolly been asked before
but one of my comps

the Emachines Celeron 400w/30gig HDD only has 128mb RAM

this comp runs Win98 and F@H exclusively (it never gets used for anything else - folds 24/7)

would it benefit (speed up) F@H if I added some RAM to it..
I would be able to get up to 2x256mb RAM sticks (thats what the mobo supports, anyways)
right now it has just 1x128mb RAM Stick
SDRam of course..

[poptom]

You might get some feel for it by having System Monitor look at "unused physical memory".

It appears to me that fah uses very little memory.

[BaLa]

err..
it's at 73.2mb
so that means it's not using 73.2mb
so 128-73.2= 54.8 is how much it is using?

[poptom]

OK. Now stop fah and see what it says. Not much diff, huh?

[BaLa]

nope 68.3mb now

[Encnuk]

F@H is CPU intensive, not RAM intensive. A faster CPU helps. The Tinker core seems to run faster on AMD CPU's, the Gromacs core seems to run faster on Intel CPU's.

On my machine, F@H uses 4.7 MB of real memory and 57 MB of virtual memory. It also has virtually no page faults, meaning that it does not need to swap pages from the paging file (hard disk) to the ram and vice versa.

If you ran NT/2k you could check the number of page faults the core, not the console, has in task manager. If you notice the number of page faults going up and up over a short period of time, it means that your computer does not keep the program in ram and keeps swapping it to disk. In that circumstance, more memory would be beneficial. If there are no page faults, more memory will do nothing for your.

In Task Manager, under the View menu you can select which columns it should display. There you find Page Faults. Sadly, I don't believe 98 has a task manager.

[poptom]

WIN 98se system monitor can track page faults.