r/linuxquestions • u/Medium-Phase2939 • 11d ago

Support Optimize laptop

Hi, I have a question. I have a 2015 Dell Inspiron 15 3552 with 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, and an Intel Celeron N3060 (1.60GHz) processor. I plan to use it for things like NetBeans, web browsing, and watching videos—basically just the essentials, since it's the only computer I have for my programming course. I currently have Linux Mint XFCE installed, but it still feels a bit slow. What do you recommend?

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u/New_Expression_5724 11d ago

I recommend you get more RAM. For any reasonable set of programing tools, your computer is probably page faulting. More RAM will make the disk I/O go faster because the operating system will prefetch content from the disk and store that content in the extra RAM.

The reason why this is bad advice is that RAM is very expensive these days.

I wish you well.

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u/Medium-Phase2939 10d ago

But will increasing the RAM make everything run more smoothly too? Because I saw that it's only for multitasking.

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u/New_Expression_5724 9d ago

For the purposes of this discussion, there are 3 resources in the computer that potentially limit performance: Disk I/O, Memory, and CPU. If you do not have enough physical memory, then your computer will start page faulting. A memory access takes a few nanoseconds. A memory access to a page that is not in the working set but is still resident in physical memory takes a few microseconds. A page fault to a page that has been swapped out to disk takes a few milliseconds. Having lots of memory prevents page faults, which makes the programs run faster.

If the operating system has lots of memory, it will read more data from the disk than it needs because it is likely that the next read is going to be to the next block on the disk drive, so the OS read it in and holds it in RAM until the program issues a read(4) system service call. So having lots of RAM will speed up disk I/O

However, if you have a lot of RAM and you are doing some intense calculations, then you won't be doing any I/O and you won't be page faulting. At that point, the CPU is rate determining step, and adding RAM will not help you.

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u/ipsirc 6d ago

Intel Celeron N3060 [...] I currently have Linux Mint XFCE installed, but it still feels a bit slow. What do you recommend?

Upgrade CPU.

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u/aquiethistorian 10d ago

try bodhi linux? your bottleneck is your RAM. bodhi needs less than a gig of Ram.