Full use of 3 GB RAM

[sahlad]

I'm a happy owner of a TS-569L since approximately a year back. My main use for it is the HD-station and xbmc. Since the rendering of the images in xbmc is rather slow and movies many times has a lag I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade from 1 GB to 3 GB RAM, so a few months ago I did just that.

So, now to my issue: In the NAS system and hardware information I can see that I now have 3 GB successfully installed RAM. However, the usage of RAM still never goes above 1 GB. Experience wise everything is as before the upgrade. So simply, so far, the upgrade of RAM has been a waste of money. Nowhere about upgrading the RAM I have found that I should change any settings and according to some posts the latest versions of firmware should recognize upgraded RAM automatically, so all posts about upgrading the RAM has been dead ends in regards to find out what I should do to get full use of my 3 GB.

Any idea what to do to get any use for the last 2 GB of RAM?

[dsmithdewarcom]

AFAICT, the main benefit of more RAM on a QNAP is to allow running more virtualized guests. If you're not doing that, there may be little/no benefit.

[pwilson]

I'm a happy owner of a TS-569L since approximately a year back. My main use for it is the HD-station and xbmc. Since the rendering of the images in xbmc is rather slow and movies many times has a lag I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade from 1 GB to 3 GB RAM, so a few months ago I did just that.

So, now to my issue: In the NAS system and hardware information I can see that I now have 3 GB successfully installed RAM. However, the usage of RAM still never goes above 1 GB. Experience wise everything is as before the upgrade. So simply, so far, the upgrade of RAM has been a waste of money. Nowhere about upgrading the RAM I have found that I should change any settings and according to some posts the latest versions of firmware should recognize upgraded RAM automatically, so all posts about upgrading the RAM has been dead ends in regards to find out what I should do to get full use of my 3 GB.

Any idea what to do to get any use for the last 2 GB of RAM?

Your NAS will use all the RAM you can throw at it. (3GB Max on your model).

Please provide the output of:

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free | grep -v cache:

Here is the output of this command here:

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free | grep -v cache:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8069752    7074748     995004          0     783916    3789784
Swap:      1060216          0    1060216

I upgraded my TS-470 Pro to 8GB of RAM. (The above memory usage is my NAS without any form of Virtualization running on it. Note it is using 7GB of RAM at the present time).

[forkless]

Linux can be configured to reduce swapping, which in some instances can cause unwanted disk thrashing for real-time processing. You can try and improve the memory behavior by lowering the 'swappiness' which default is set at 60.

To check the current value

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cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To set the swappiness

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echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Caveat: This value will reset to the default 60 rebooting the NAS. To 'permanently' set it (if it helps improve the performance) you could add it to an autorun script. Plenty of examples to be found using the search and/or on the QNAP Wiki.

For some more background on how certain values affect the kernel behavior I recommend reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness


PS. Don't expect massive miracles.

[dsmithdewarcom]

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/219 ... and-Perfor

[sahlad]

That is quite odd... That command shows that there is barely no free memory:

free | grep -v cache:
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 3072684 3019640 53044 0 166236
Swap: 530108 4 530104
Total: 3602792 3019644 583148

But when I check the hardware information in the GUI it says that there is 2.5 GB RAM free....

qnap.png

[pwilson]

That is quite odd... That command shows that there is barely no free memory:

free | grep -v cache:
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 3072684 3019640 53044 0 166236
Swap: 530108 4 530104
Total: 3602792 3019644 583148

But when I check the hardware information in the GUI it says that there is 2.5 GB RAM free....

qnap.png

Welcome to why almost all my replies in this Forum start with:

Please access your NAS via SSH, login as "admin", and run: ......

The command line gives you access to tools, that simply aren't available in the WebUI. A WebUI is a great way of configuring things if the WebUI is built properly, but typically WebUI's are less than useful for troubleshooting.

I hope that output proves to you that your investment in additional RAM was not a waste of money.

[sahlad]

Well, at least it proved that the RAM is used, even though I haven't noticed much difference in user experience though
And I agree, a WebUI may not be the best way to fault search anything, but I think one should be able to expect that the figures that are exposed in the webui are still correct. Since that is not the case I have to say that part is a dissapointment.
Since the added RAM didn't do much difference to response times and handling movies in xbmc, are there anything else one can do to improve that? Would, for instance, dividing large movie folders into smaller subfolders make it easier for xbmc to handle a large amount of movies?

[pwilson]

Well, at least it proved that the RAM is used, even though I haven't noticed much difference in user experience though
And I agree, a WebUI may not be the best way to fault search anything, but I think one should be able to expect that the figures that are exposed in the webui are still correct. Since that is not the case I have to say that part is a dissapointment.
Since the added RAM didn't do much difference to response times and handling movies in xbmc, are there anything else one can do to improve that? Would, for instance, dividing large movie folders into smaller subfolders make it easier for xbmc to handle a large amount of movies?

Not really, I'm afraid your Intel Atom, is a slow 32bit dual-core processor, that can not be upgraded. (It is soldered to the motherboard). I fair far better with my TS-470 Pro, as it uses a nice generic socketted Ivy-bridge Intel i3-3220, which is a multicore 64bit processor. XBMC is very CPU/RAM intensive, you have upgraded the RAM, but upgrading the CPU isn't possible.

Adding RAM will have improved the performance, but the improvement will be minimal.

[P3R]

Since the rendering of the images in xbmc is rather slow and movies many times has a lag I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade from 1 GB to 3 GB RAM, so a few months ago I did just that.

Yes, simply throwing the one hardware (RAM) that you can add to a system for a reasonable price is a classic way to try and solve performance problems.

Sometimes (when well researched) it can be successful, but often it will be a disappointment (when expectations are wrong).

So, now to my issue: In the NAS system and hardware information I can see that I now have 3 GB successfully installed RAM. However, the usage of RAM still never goes above 1 GB.

If you interpret the gui text like this, maybe you will feel better:
Free memory = Memory not requested by active applications, so instead used for caching

Despite not being literally correct I do have sympathy for the choice of the shorter description "Free momory" by Qnap in the gui (they could however have added an explanation similar to mine somewhere, maybe in the help text).

If they had shown the actual free memory, it would be a very low number that's more or less static and much, much less useful than the number they show now.

Experience wise everything is as before the upgrade. So simply, so far, the upgrade of RAM has been a waste of money.

Since the applications you run only use about 1 GB of memory, the system didn't need to swap (at least not significantly) to disk prior to your memory upgrade either. For that reason the added RAM is "only" used for caching.

Any idea what to do to get any use for the last 2 GB of RAM?

It is already being used. It is used for caching, which improves the overall performance slightly.

Only when a system is doing much swapping of memory to disk will a RAM upgrade give great improvements in performance.

[sahlad]

Thanks for all the help and replies!

[AntonioManuel]

Check.

viewtopic.php?f=50&t=148676&p=716365#p716365