I am using QGIS 2.12.0- Lyon (64-bit) at work and have been finding with especially large amounts of data (many vector layers) that all processes on the system have been running slower. I am running on a Windows 7 machine, 64-bit system, with 4GB RAM and an Intel(R) Core i5 processor, at 3.20GHz.
I was wondering if increasing the RAM would make a difference to the speed of loading and manipulating my map on QGIS? Is it worth increasing?
I had also heard that ArcGIS versions before 10 were not able to use multi-core processing, and wondered if this may be the case for QGIS also, therefore there is no need to upgrade processors?
Best Answer
Loading in the first place depends a lot on the HDD/SSD and not the RAM.
Drawing depends a lot on your CPU or Graphic-Card, which is done after loading or manipulating something in the map (like zoom or pan).
Qgis can be set to use multiple cores to draw features. This you can find in the Options. Maybe its faster then.
Then you can just open the task-manager and look how much RAM is used. If it is not 3/4 full its just slow because of the drawing of the vector data. More RAM will not much fasten up that specific issue.
If the RAM is full it will be extremly slow as it starts to swap to HDD. You will notice it as the whole system feels like it is hung up for some seconds from time to time.
Otherwise increasing RAM is cheap and always good as Vince mentioned, but maybe not the issue here.