PlaneVuki wrote on 2023-03-22, 05:31:
But isn't L2-uncached ram still above hard drive in memory hierarchy, so why having more than 64mb in those chipsets is "bad"? The page says remove ram if you have more than 64mb. If the program requires 128mb ram, isn't L2-cached 64mb + L2-uncached 64mb better than L2-cached 64mb + 64mb swap file ?
Using more than 64MB on those systems you cripple your performance, because you can’t control the address space and OS memory management in fact uses the RAM first from the bottom, so it fills the cacheable RAM last. You can get something like 30%-40% performance hit in this case.
So yes, your RAM is naturally still faster than HDD file, but the trade off is that you bring the overall performance down significantly and you can’t mitigate that in any way.
I don’t see 64MB limit a big issue. I have Pentium with TX (64MB limit) and have 98lite installed. It works smoothly and runs everything that is suitable for the system just fine. Heck, back in the day I had 16MB RAM on my Pentium in 1995 and was completely satisfied with it with Windows 95. IMO we easily get distracted with these old systems and try to push them on the level that resembles something we have today, but they are in many ways still limited. Very few home owners (or office workers) had 64MB back in the day.
It is what it is and enjoy the system for what it is. Besides, it is pretty easy to test pentium box with different amounts of memory. In fact, I have planned to do that, I have one unused VX Pentium box sitting around and when I get my other projects done, I jump on it and while tinkering with it, I’ll test different memory configurations out with it and how they affect the performance.