Upgrade from 1GB ram to 4GB ram???

I've seen a couple of hosting companies that use machines with some crazy amount of ram like 4GB. My question is this: How much of a difference does it make to load up a machine with that amount of ram?

For example, say I have a dual 1ghz, scsi u/160 machine with 1GB ram that runs at an average server load of 2.0 during peak times with around 200 medium usage clients on it (some moderate perl scripting / mysql databases). Now if I take and load up that same server with 4GB ram, how much of a difference is it going to make? I know people always say that webservers consume ram at a very high rate, but 4GB just seems like a ridiculously high amount to me.

I'm just looking for ballpark figures here trying to decide if I should shell out the cash to upgrade the server to 4GB or not. I mean, would you say the load would drop slightly, a decent amount, or a large amount? If I could drop the load on the server to 1.0 instead of 2.0 I would consider it well worth the $1600 I'd spend on ram, but if it's only going to drop it to like 1.9, I'd be better off investing my money in something else... Upgrade from 1GB ram to 4GB ram???

Thanks for your input! Upgrade from 1GB ram to 4GB ram???

 

 

 

 

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