Memory upgrade effect on performance

[rafacq]

How much an improvement in performance will I see if I bumped the memory in my Power Mac Dual 2.5Ghz G5 from 1.5 Gig to 5.5 Gig? Will it be worth spending $140 for 4 Gigs? Does anyone know of a better price? I am thinking of ordering from OWC.

[mad jew]

Increasing memory merely decreases a bottleneck. If you're not accumulating page ins and page outs very rapidly whilst using your machine, then additional memory will be of a lesser benefit to you. Restart the machine and use it as you normally would. Record the page ins and page outs (viewed in Activity Monitor) over a day or so and report back. :)

[SmurfBoxMasta]

If you do things that require large amounts of ram, then the upgrade will help tremendously......ie gaming or other 3D apps, working with LIVE video, or HUGE image file processing, DNA research etc......

if not, then notta. 1.5-3gb is fine for normal everyday stuff......

do as mj said, check your page outs for the REAL, definitive answer :eek:

[rafacq]

Thanks. I am mostly interested because my iPhoto library is over 10,000 photos and its running really slow!

[scottydawg]

Thanks. I am mostly interested because my iPhoto library is over 10,000 photos and its running really slow!

One thing that will speed up iPhoto if it's running slow is to make sure and go to the iPhoto menu and "empty the trash". Apologies if you already know this but I have found a lot of people didn't know there is a separate trash for iPhoto so I am just trying to be helpful.

[OZMP]

a fast hard drive will help :)
going from the normal MacPro drive to a Seagate 7200.11 made a noticable difference, as did going from 1gb or ram too 3

[rafacq]

Thanks everyone.

OWC notified me the memory shipped yesterday. I expect it will arrive Tuesday. Will post my comments after I receive and install the SDRAMS.