RAM a Simple Analogy
July 24th, 2007 | Memory
Computer Memory and Speed: An Analogy
The size of RAM in your PC can have an enormous effect on your PC’s performance. As someone who works with computers on a daily basis and who derives his income primarily from the installation, repair and support of them, I am frequently asked why is my machine running so slowly?
Poor performance in computers can be a symptom of many different problems. In this article I will cover the issue of RAM or the lack of it in many systems that people have in their homes or offices.
My favorite analogy references cooking dinner at your house. In this analogy I use your countertop as the cache memory on your CPU or processor, your cupboards as your RAM memory, and the grocery store as your hard drive. Imagine that you’re making stew for dinner and the ingredients you need are meat potatoes carrots and celery onions spices and salt and pepper. The countertop is fairly small and can only hold two of your ingredients at any one time. Everything on your countertop is easily accessible and you can get rapidly. The other items that you need are in your cupboard and they take a little bit longer to get. When it comes time to get the potatoes however you find that you don’t have any in your cupboard. This entails a trip to the grocery store. How much longer does it take to go to the grocery store to get your potatoes rather than reaching into the cupboard. To compare this to a computer system when your computer goes to access data from RAM and does not find it there it has to go to the hard drive which ends up being about a thousand times slower than accessing anything located in RAM.
As you can see if your system does not have sufficient RAM it’s always having to run to the grocery store to get potatoes. This takes a severe penalty on the performance of your system. By increasing the size of your cupboard you can store more potatoes and run less to the store. Or in computer terms the more data you can store in RAM the less your computer will need to access the hard drive thereby speeding up your computer.
To wrap this up many issues of machine performance short of buying a new PC can be corrected by simply installing more in your machine.
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