Is it worth upgrading from the pi 5 8Gb to the 16GB?

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1

All I use it for is surfing the internet. I was using a PC but the electricity bill was killing me just watching Youtube and general browsing.
I do have quite a few tabs open which causes problems and I suspect it is lack of memory.
If I decide to get another Pi I can use my 8GB one for a TV box.
Any advice would be appreciated.

2

First determine if you are using all the the 8G. Open a terminal and type ‘free’ on the command line. You should see something like this:

$ free
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:         8245504     2256784     3924304      194256     2357872     5988720
Swap:       16510960           0    16510960

If the used swap space ‘used’ is always zero adding more memory won’t help. PI’s have been historically stingy on swap size so you could be filling up memory and swap space. When I use NVMe I edit ‘/etc/dphys-swapfile’ to look like this:

# where we want the swapfile to be, this is the default
#CONF_SWAPFILE=/var/swap

# set size to absolute value, leaving empty (default) then uses computed value
#   you most likely don't want this, unless you have an special disk situation
#CONF_SWAPSIZE=512

# set size to computed value, this times RAM size, dynamically adapts,
#   guarantees that there is enough swap without wasting disk space on excess
CONF_SWAPFACTOR=2

# restrict size (computed and absolute!) to maximally this limit
#   can be set to empty for no limit, but beware of filled partitions!
#   this is/was a (outdated?) 32bit kernel limit (in MBytes), do not overrun it
#   but is also sensible on 64bit to prevent filling /var or even / partition
CONF_MAXSWAP=

This sets the swap size to 2 times memory size. Note there are 3 changes to the default setting.

Curt

3

Ahh thank you, that’s opened my eyes quite a bit.
I wonder if it could be a lack of processing power.

4

For this, open a terminal and run top. This will display your cpu-intensive programs right on the top. You can also see the total amount of “cpu used” in the header, which maxes out at 400% since you have four cores.

Can you describe your problems? This might also help to find the real problem.