Hello, Im fairly new to macs having purchased a white macbook in April, sometimes when I am multi-tasking I get the spinning beachball and was wondering how I can see if it is being caused by a lack of RAM or if my hard drive is bogging down, I have 2 GB RAM on my macbook. thanks
Just a guess....SWAP usage (you can check this in Activity Monitor, Swap used - Page IN/OUTS).
Sadly, some common daily-use apps like e.g. SAFARI are HUGE memory eaters, and from my POV (and i'm not the only one) there is a bug with Safaris memory management.
E.g. right now, only 2 tabs are open, google and macrumors forum... though Safari still eats up +1,3 GB of RAM (despite i closed the other tabs before) and it does not give up it's "inactive memory" - not even if another app requires it - not even if i close all tabs, windows and wait for hours. (only way to prevent this, is quitting Safari after a browsing session)
So HDD-swapping occurs - system slows down.
Upgrading from 2 -> 4 GB RAM helped a bit, but still at some point the HDD was used for swapping.
so i upgraded to a SSD - this was the speedboost i was looking for.
Still HDD swapping occurs, but due to the "speed" of SSDs, you don't recognize it anymore.
