Adding Jetson Nano external RAM

Hello,

Jetson Nano CPUs are running full when opened several programs and browser pages. I wonder if there is way to add an external RAM?

No. You would be limited to experimenting with swap, which is obviously not ideal. Not everything can use swap, and if it does, then performance goes down.

2 Likes

Thank you for the comment
Do you think using swap on SSD would help reducing CPU load comparing with swap on micro SD card?

We did swap to nvme via a t100 and it has improved it a little but yeah they do get a little bottlenecked from time to time still running whole office on it and designing its own robotics transport system on blender on it have other computers but they’re gathering dust was hoping i could do whole inference training internally wanted to see if i could use the nano to design develop and print its own robotic transport system but isaac just a little to compute hungry and they didn’t make an arm version so methinks might have to turn on one of those noisy old machines and watch my power bill rocket bit sad i liked the idea of being able to make an off grid system that could build itself train itself and replicate from a shippable platform you could air drop and power with solar but soon :) were nearly there.

1 Like

First, “CPU load” has almost nothing to do with RAM available.
Second, adding swap will, if anything, increase CPU load, because you’ll be spending time managing swap space, and doing I/O to generally pretty slow external storage.
The Jetson Nano is based on a very old design – it’s a Jetson TX1, with half the GPU cut out. It’s like a Nintendo Switch, with half the GPU cut out. The CPU is like that of a six year old cell phone. If you want higher performance, you need to pay more, like the Xavier NX or Xavier AGX. (And at that point, around $700, if you don’t need the embedded form factor, a desktop or laptop system with a discrete GPU starts looking attractive …)

2 Likes

Same as what @snarky said…CPU load will not go down based on RAM. Speed can go up with more RAM in a system needing more RAM, but CPU load will not go down.

Btw, there is nothing wrong with running at full CPU load if you are getting the speed you need. If you need more speed, then you need faster hardware, or optimizing and trimming of what the software is doing.

2 Likes

Swap on MicroSD is as bad as it gets, so SSD is better than that, but it’s not what most people would call “good.” You have to try it for yourself to see if it’s “good enough” for your use case.

2 Likes