[Mogens V.]

Tobiah wrote:

Now I'm not saying that having 2gb is not necessary. In fact if you
load up VERY LARGE libraries it could be used. But most of the time
it'll stay idle and wait for some data.


On a Linux box, all available memory will quickly be consumed
for caching hard drive reads. It doesn't matter how large
the memory space is. If your memory size equals that of
the disk, you could conceivably cache the entire disk, and not
have to read from the disk again until reboot.

Not fully true. Data is sync'ed to disk all the time, so real file
changes needs to be rehashed.

The same
goes for writes, although the OS usually syncs writes to
the disk now and then to prevent loss of data through loss

Not usually; always, and not now and then, all the time.

of power. The memory is not 'full', in the sense that the
OS will simply drop cached disk reads when the memory is
needed by a process.

The bottom line is that more memory will always help to
some degree, because it reduces the amount of redundant
disk reads. I don't know how Windows handles this, but
if it is not in a similar way, then it is quite lacking
in this regard.

In this respect, M$ lacks, but it's a bit irrelevant as Linux isn't yet
useful as base for a DAW.

--
Kind regards,
Mogens V.