openSUSE 12.3
KDE 4.10.5 r1
Are there any apps in the standard distr that measure performance ?
If not, then 3rd party ?
I am about to do a memory upgrade and I was wanting to see if it makes any difference.
Thanks
Hi
Top or htop will show your memory usage…? free is another. At the end of the day, it will only be the user that will notice the improvement 
How much memory do you currently have and what are you planning to upgrade to? Is the system swapping alot, if so tweaking the swappiness may help.
It has 2gb now and expandable to 4, at least that’s what the Toshiba site says.
That’s interesting about the swappiness and I would like to do some reading on it. The swap file size is whatever the default is at installation time.
Hi
Ahh that’s right, there has been discussion on that 
You should notice a difference if 4GB will fit, but will probably still use some swap. Runnning vmstat and iostat will show info as well.
What type of drive do you have installed (model number)?
Well, that was painless. The old sticks slid out and the new ones slid right in and I held my breath as it booted up.
Uneventful and I swear that it’s faster.
I wrote some top numbers down before and after
| Kib mem | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| tot | 1792972 | 3795388 |
| used | 1172644 | 770345 |
| free | 619959 | 3030096 |
| buffers | 22644 | 31746 |
| Kib Swap | Before | after |
|---|---|---|
| tot | 2103292 | 2103292 |
| used | 562316 | 0*** |
| free | 1540976 | 2103292 |
| cached | 285552 | 345824 |
*** I think this means no swapping which is mega cool.
There is a pretty comprehensive performance measuring application here
It can even be used to check cpu cooling by giving all cores a lot of work to do and seeing if thermal throttling kicks in.
Increasing memory doesn’t really fit in with this sort of thing though. It depends on what is being run on the machine. The swap partition is used if there isn’t enough memory available. One way of checking that is
john@linux-448o:~> vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- -----cpu------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
1 0 0 19713276 217688 1586480 0 0 1 2 7 7 2 0 98 0 0
john@linux-448o:~>
See man vmstat for more info but basically si and so show swap usage.