OpenBSD 4.4 doing well on the desktop in 768 MB of RAM

When I first installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba 1101-S101 laptop (Celeron 1.3 GHz), I kept the stock 256 MB of RAM.

Everything was running so well that I didn't hurry to add RAM.

But since I do have spare PC133 SODIMMs, I could've bumped it up to 512 MB, 768 MB or 1 GB.

I decided to go with 768 MB for now, which meant adding a 512 MB SODIMM.

Opening up the bottom of the Toshiba, installing the module, closing it up and booting all went fine.

And now I'm starting to look at how the system is using memory. Right now I'm running the Opera and Firefox Web browsers, the Geany text editor, the GIMP image editor and an xterm window. This is all in fvwm, OpenBSD's default window manager.

The top utility reports that I still have 289 MB of free memory, and I'm not using any swap at all.

I then opened a spreadsheet and document in OpenOffice (which happens mighty slowly, by the way). Free memory dropped to 190 MB. I realized that while I had the GIMP running, I didn't have any files opened. I cranked up one of the .jpgs I worked on earlier in the day, and free memory was now at 186 MB.

I still could pull the 256 MB module and replace it with another 512 MB SODIMM, but for now this is pretty good performance. I can imagine things going to hell if I started streaming video (on the sites that Opera's Flash plugin support), but in terms of getting work done on this laptop, OpenBSD and 768 MB of memory are doing very well.