On Sunday 08 May 2005 7:45 am, Tatsuhiko Maegawa wrote:

When I visited Tokyo Akihabara, I've seen Windows XP 64bit Edition on sale. Interested, looked up, and found out that I need 1 Gigabyte RAM in order to install it. Since many visiters out there searches for humongous computer (but they are geeks, not pimps) they make no surprise about it - but me.

Though I am not interested in using Windows XP 64 bit Edition, it crosses my mind as to whether I need 1Gigabyte of RAM for my Linux machine. At the moment, I see no reason why I bundle up further, as my machine seems running well. I know I need little further up on developing stuff with Java, since Eclipse kindly asks 758Mb of RAM for ease.

I wouldn't have believed it unless I had seen it with my own eyes but there is a minimum requirement of 1GB is listed for XP64 http://tinyurl.com/2es47 (Microsoft)

I wonder why that is a minimum requirement, a recommended one perhaps but minimum suggests that it won't even install without 1GB.

Anyway Tatsuhiko, in answer to your question you don't need 1GB of ram unless applications or tasks you are performing require it. Personally I have 1GB on a 64bit machine here, but half of that is currently being used to run virtual machines and it is still running fine.

The way I understand it the memory footprint of 64bit applications (on both platforms) can be bigger when compared to their 32bit counterparts. But I don't think this is a huge difference and therefore the memory requirements of 64bit linux should be very similar to 32bit systems.

If you are worried about it then keep an eye on /proc/meminfo and if you see a large difference between SwapTotal and SwapFree when doing something intensive on the system then perhaps you should invest in a bit more ram.