Toshiba laptop gets a memory upgrade

Previously on this blog I described how my laptop was using 93% of its available RAM and 69% of available swap memory after a few hours use, largely due to having a dozen or more browser tabs open. Not an ideal situation. That doesn't leave any memory available to open up a word processing application or an image editor without the computer slowing down as Firefox is forced to cache tab content to disk. I have noticed that with several memory-intensive programs running, background programs are very slow to reopen, presumable because they have cached content to the disk. And of course with both RAM and swap (virtual memory) almost full, it leaves the computer likely to experience thrashing and crashing, if a program uses too much memory, whether due to me asking it to work on a large file, or some sort of bug causing excessive memory use.

So, time for some new memory. I found an identical card to the existing 4GB card in the laptop on eBay and popped it in the empty slot.

I didn't take a picture, but I have one from when I cleaned the fan (hence the very dusty fan in the corner). The procedure is very simple. Pull out the metal cover between the two sockets, put in the new card pins into socket at a 45 degree angle, push it down till it clicks, and replace the metal cover. Be careful because it has a lug on one side that goes into a hole in the board. Don't forget to earth yourself. I put my naked toe on the copper radiator pipe - only issue in the winter, it's hot, ouch!

A useful command to check memory is:

dmidecode --type memory | less

Which tells you about the cards installed, including manufacturer, part number and specification, all of which matched for my eBay card, although the label was different - something I will have to investigate later.

Here is a comparison shot of Task Manager with 43(!) tabs open in Firefox.

Swap memory has also increased since my previous post, when the laptop had 975MB of swap. The default installation of Debian Bullseye created this much swap. Supposedly this is done automatically according to memory and hard disk space available, but my other computer has the same amount of memory and the same hard disk size, and yet it has four times as much swap.

There are a lot of different recommendations for swap size on the internet, but 975MB certainly seems too small a size - it certainly isn't big enough to hibernate the computer because that involves writing the entire memory to disk, and 4GB won't fit in 975MB. Swap memory was at 69% as mentioned before, which doesn't allow much room for manoeuvrer. 

Increasing the size of swap memory was actually fairly easy, but it does involve booting into a GParted live CD or USB. Once I had done so I could shrink the main partition to make room for the swap partition to expand. The swap partition is found inside an extended partition, at the "end" of the main partition, so it's necessary to move the extended partition to the left before expanding the swap partition.

Grab the arrows at the ends of the partition to resize because the buttons take forever.

I gave the extended swap partition 9542MB, a fairly arbitrary figure, but as I actually did this before adding the extra RAM, it meant I had over twice as much swap as RAM. Surely enough to hibernate?

I tried hibernating the computer, but unfortunately ran into a video driver bug that means the screen remains blank after coming out of hibernation.

kernel: [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
kernel: [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed
kernel: [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* displayport link status failed
kernel: [drm:radeon_dp_link_train [radeon]] *ERROR* clock recovery failed

Oh, well. On a 500GB disk, I'm not really missing 9.5GB. The computer hasn't touched available swap space since I installed the new memory, but maybe the video bug will get fixed and allow hibernation at some point.