Question

You are running a memory-intensive multimedia application on your computer, which has 1 GB RAM installed. You observe that the computer momentarily stops responding when you switch between two multimedia applications. Your friend suggests upgrading the RAM to 2 GB to correct the performance problems.

Do you agree with your friend? Specify reasons.

Is there any other way to solve the performance problem? Justify your answer.

Answer 1

It is very common to see the systems crashing, or sudden rebooting, or even stopping the response in the middle of the running.

Somehow RAM is responsible for all this troubles. We will first understand what RAM is, and how it affects the computer systems.

RAM stands for random access memory, it stores the pages or files which are currently being used for the execution, in this case, your multimedia application.

Job of the ram is to continuously feed the processor the required files needed for the execution.

Now since the processors are faster than the RAM, they need the data quick enough, so that they cannot be kept ideal.

now it is pretty much obvious that, If the size of the ram is large enough, it can store more data than usual, thus more data can be sent to the processor for processing or execution.

Switching between multimedias requires good amount of storage space available on the RAM. since switching causes complete change in the processing on the processors, there should be no delay of the response time of the data feeding and data fetching from the ran and the processor.

Now as per the given scenario, as you are going to double the size of the RAM, you can experience the significant change in the speed of execution of both the multimedia application.

However, using more RAM memory is not going to give you super fast experience while running the applications since there are other factors which are responsible for the speedup. such as,

Bus size - responsible for actual carrying of the data from memory to the processor.

Processor being used also holds much importance, 64 bit are often faster than 32 bit processors.