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I find Ubuntu 64bit to be a little slow on my notebook with a Core i5 and 2 GB of RAM. Especially alt+tab takes some time to show up sometimes.

I mostly run Chromium, Thunderbird, LibreOffice Writer, Banshee and pdfviewer. Right now I'm just running the first two plus UbuntuOne in the background and there's 87% RAM used.

Should I upgrade to 4 GB?

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You should see a huge performance increase if you computer supports 4 GB RAM, and you install it... – Gui Apr 23 '12 at 15:35

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You mention you're using 64-bit Ubuntu on a 2GB system. The main advantage of 64-bit is the ability to address more memory, but for 2GB you don't really need it. Another advantage is that 64-bit code is slightly faster to execute, but if you're actually feeling the system be sluggish you may be hitting the swap file due to memory exhaustion, which negates the speed advantage.

The downside is that 64-bit uses up more memory than 32-bit. This is a good tradeoff if you need a system to handle more than 4 GB RAM, but for systems with 3 GB and below, this is a non-issue as 32-bit can do that just fine.

Your question is whether to upgrade to 4 GB RAM. More memory is always good, but if you don't have a specific need for it, you could instead install Ubuntu 32-bit, which can handle 2 GB just fine, and should be noticeably faster on your system.

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I purchased an additional 4 GB which was installed in no time because the slot was accessible from the rear of the notebook. It came with Windows 7 64bit and I thought I should use the 64bit Ubuntu. Thanks for your elaborate answer on the subject! – arno Apr 23 '12 at 17:06
I'm not sure a 32 bit are faster than a 64 bit, my (not very scientific) test indicated the opposite. This better test favor 64 bit too: phoronix.com/… – Anders Wallenquist Apr 24 '12 at 21:23
@Anders: I said "64-bit code is slightly faster to execute" :) However, that speed advantage may be negated if the system is forced to swap frequently due to memory overuse. 64-bit systems also consume a bit more memory. So yes, a 64-bit system will trump a 32-bit one with 4 GB RAM, but I'm pretty sure with lower amounts of memory (1GB for sure and maybe 2 GB), 64-bit will be slower due to swapping. – roadmr Apr 24 '12 at 21:36
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If you switched to firefox your memory footprint would drop significantly. Sandboxing every website is expensive, and FF can sandbox plugins now so its much more robust. If switching browsers is a no go you can tweak chrome with undocumented switches that change the memory model like --single-process or --process-per-site.

If it comes to opening your wallet, and it's an exclusive choice, an SSD will give you a nice overall performance increase.

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It's fun you mention switching browsers. I did use Firefox before switching to Chromium because I thought the latter needs less memory. I found Firefox to be slow with a lot of tabs open. It froze from time to time. – arno Apr 23 '12 at 17:03
From a cold start, google-chrome uses 30% more memory than firefox on 12.04 and that's with only a single tab open. I used to have like 20-30 open tabs in chrome, each consuming 20-70 MB, and it would slow down my system; that's with i5+ 4G + SSD. Switching to firefox + a reduction in extensions solved the issue, the zoom isn't as pretty, but that doesn't mean I can't fire up chrome now and then, it's just not my primary browser anymore. – ppetraki Apr 23 '12 at 19:08
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Ram is cheep today, if you wait to upgrade prices for your type of ram will raise. I have 8 GB of ram and a SSD on my Core i5 laptop and it's fast, very fast. I can't say that I "need" that much memory but Ubuntu will use as much as it can for cache and likely. Memory are newer bad. It cost me less than 5 % of the total price for the notebook (<30 EUR of 700 EUR for an Asus u36jc 2011) for the upgrade from 2 to 8 GB, SSD was more expensive about 80 EUR.

Starting libreoffice takes abount 0.3 sec

aw@U36JC:~$ time libreoffice --writer --terminate_after_init

real    0m0.217s
user    0m0.196s
sys 0m0.048s

Boot-time are 3 sec to 7 sec except for time in BIOS, despite that I have a LAMP, Postgresql and an OpenERP that has to start on every boot too.

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You can monitor the memory usage by using 'top' command. If you see the swap is being used often, then adding more RAM will certainly help.

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I don't think there are much swap with 2GB ram doing some browsing and office-work. But if it is you certainly have to upgrade your memory. – Anders Wallenquist Apr 23 '12 at 14:33

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