How much RAM is really necessary?

[beefcake]

I've always been told, the more RAM, the better. I wonder though, if I consistently have 55mb of free RAM when running all the programs I need, would buying more RAM do anything at all? I have a 1 Ghz TiBook and a single module of 512mb ram. Although I'd like to think spending $140 on memory would make my powerbook faster, if I have free ram at all times, wouldn't the extra 512mb I'd buy be dead weight?

Also, I don't want to turn this thread into another "which notebook ram to buy" debate, but is crucial ram any better than other well-established brands of memory?

[mnkeybsness]

what do you primarily do on your computer?

512MB is what i recommend for the average user.

[James Craner]

I would say that the improvement in going from 512MB to 1 GB is marginal. It all depends on what you doing, if you are manipulating large photoshop files or other such memory intensive work then you will notice it more.

I would not say that crucial has any better memory than anyone else, but when I increased the memory on my Powerbook from 512MB to 1 GB, I had to send the memory back twice from another vendor because it caused the Powerbook to lock up, even though it matched the required specification. Eventually purchased from Crucial in the UK and it worked first time.

[beefcake]

Primarily, I run Mail, AIM, Safari, iTunes, Sherlock and Direct Connect. At times I will have World and Excel running simultaneously. Other than that, I haven't been using any heavyweight programs.

[James Craner]

Originally posted by beefcake
Primarily, I run Mail, AIM, Safari, iTunes, Sherlock and Direct Connect. At times I will have World and Excel running simultaneously. Other than that, I haven't been using any heavyweight programs.

Hi Beefcake, looking at your usage I would save your money, I don't believe you would see much benefit.

[beefcake]

Thanks for the advice, it now seems clear that a purchase of Family Guy DVDs would yield far more productive results.

[floatingspirit]

What about someone running Quark Express, mail, safari, iTunes, iChat, MS Word and 2 or 3 other ordinary programs all at once? Would there be a big difference going from 512 to 1Gig of ram? I'm thinking on a 1.25 PowerBook or on a 1.6 G5 tower.

Thanks in advance for your input.

[rendezvouscp]

I have a dual 2 g5 and my dad a 1.25 PB. On his PB, I can see another 512 stick helping out some (for those busy days), and on my g5 I don't see a real need to add ram. We both continuously have iCal, iChat, iTunes, Mail, Word, Safari, various other apps, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver open. If that's any help, good.
–Chase

[hugemullens]

I would say if you plan on making a living with your computer. 1 gig or higher is worth it. Otherwise 512 is fine. You can't really do anything with 1 gig you can't do with 512. It'll be a little slower, but i would think the family guy or futurama DVD box sets would be a better investment. As a note i have no probs with 640 with photoshop or fce, and i ALWAYS have msn messenger, ichat, mail, safari, and other odd programs open in the background.

[bubbamac]

I just made the move from 768 to 1026 MB. Can't say that there's any drastic speed improvement, but I think it does help. I tend to have 16 or more apps open at once, and things can get bogged down a bit, especially when I'm working on 5 or 6 web pages at once (two windows each - one for the HTML, one for the browser.).

That said, I'd imagine 512 would be OK. However, if you were going to buy a 256 chip to make it 512 (256 on board already), I'd go ahead and make it a 512 chip, for a total of 768. Not that much more expensive, and it certainly couldn't hurt down the road.

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says....he who dies with the most ram wins.....oh yeah!

[bousozoku]

I'm always advocating more RAM. Eventually, everyone gets into situations where they need it. However, if your performance is acceptable to you, why bother? The one thing that really slows down Mac OS X performance is a lack of RAM at critical times and the system has to go to the hard drive to swap information. On a laptop computer, the hard drives are slower (you knew this) and performance seems even worse than you could ever expect. If this isn't happening, wait until you have it happen occasionally and then, buy the extra RAM.

[Fender2112]

I upped my eMac from 512MB to 1GB and noticed an improvement with the OS. Not a huge speed boost but things felt snappier. Windows and files open quicker, that soft of thing.

And ditto for my G5. I upped it from 512MB to 1.5 GB. It made a huge a difference in OS X.

[beefcake]

Fabulous. I was watching Boondock Saints tonight, and as soon as it was over, I got an instant message and the whole system lagged until I finally put it to sleep for a few seconds. I guess I'll wait it out and see if this continues to be a problem. I had always planned on getting more ram from the beginning, and raised a small amount of money for that exact purpose, so I'm itching to pull the trigger on this one. Then again, Brian and Stewie are hilarious.

[floatingspirit]

hmmmm... cool. Thanks for the input all. So it sounds like, unless you're a true "Pro" user, anything over 1Gig is useless. (a strong word, but I mean for ordinary consumers) Guess I'll go with 1Gig, since publishing/editing is part of how I make a living. I'd love a PowerBook, but the G4 just isn't future compatible as a 32 bit chip. Now if only Apple would release all these rumoured displays and G5s!! As soon as they do, I'm making the buy!

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
hmmmm... cool. Thanks for the input all. So it sounds like, unless you're a true "Pro" user, anything over 1Gig is useless. (a strong word, but I mean for ordinary consumers) Guess I'll go with 1Gig, since publishing/editing is part of how I make a living. I'd love a PowerBook, but the G4 just isn't future compatible as a 32 bit chip. Now if only Apple would release all these rumoured displays and G5s!! As soon as they do, I'm making the buy!

There aren't any ordinary consumers--they're special. :) They should probably have between 512MB and 768MB and operate without trouble, unless they're playing games. Games and other 3D applications take huge amounts of RAM.

[Westside guy]

I don't know if this is a valid generalization anymore, but I used to know a number of Macheads (this was back is the OS 7 - OS 8 days) who all had a tendency to never close any program. At the end of the day if you checked the finder (what was it called; multifinder or something back then?) they might have ten or twenty programs open. It always seemed to me that it was a Mac thing, since Windows users quickly learned this didn't work well in their OS. :)

Even if you're not a power user - if you tend to leave lots of programs in memory then more RAM will benefit you because it'll mean less swapping to the hard disk.

[encro]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
I'd love a PowerBook, but the G4 just isn't future compatible as a 32 bit chip.

Oh please, what a load of crap! The use of 64bit machines outside of enterprise use is questionable at best. The only real benefit you will gain as an ordinary consumer is 64bit address space of 18 million terabytes. I highly doubt you will need the increase of data type dynamic range.

[encro]

I started with 512MB and now have 768MB.

[Bear]

Originally posted by encro
Oh please, what a load of crap! The use of 64bit machines outside of enterprise use is questionable at best. The only real benefit you will gain as an ordinary consumer is 64bit address space of 18 million terabytes. I highly doubt you will need the increase of data type dynamic range. Define ordinary consumer? Yeah, I know this is nit picking.

I use Photoshop and Nikon Capture (both open at the same time) as well as the usual suspects (IM clients, Mail, iCal, Addressbook, Webbrowser, etc) I have 2 gigs of ram on a Dual 1.42(MDD) and am frequently using swapfiles. And when you start with Final Cut Express and such, more memory is even better. Yes, most current applications will be limited to 2 gigs of ram each, so going to 8 gigs may not be worthwhile, but 4 gigs could be useful to let a couple of memory hogs get a lot of ram.

On a laptop, where the disk is slower, paging will be more noticable than on a desktop. I'm looking at 2 gigs in my next Powerbook for that reason.

Basically, if you look in /var/vm and only have one pagefile, you probably don't need ram but it will help a little. If you have more than one pagefile (and this resets after a reboot only) you probably will benefit from more ram.

[michaelrjohnson]

i agree with the general consensus that YOU may not need that much more ram for your machine. however, as was stated previously, additional ram in OS X really does speed up the OS. it becomes more responsive, noticeably. if you dont' plan on doing anything processor intensive in the near future save your money, but keep it in your mind for a future purchase. you'd be happy with it!

[virividox]

ram ram ram ram ram ram the more the merrier, of course that doesnt mean u should go overboard. look at what u do or plan to do

gaming (any mac or pc) = 1 gig or more
photoshop = 512 for noobs, 1 gig for more serious people
web design = 1 gig
video = 1 gig
audio = 1 gig, you can surivive on 512 but yeah i mean its all about making ur life easier

[floatingspirit]

Originally posted by encro
Oh please, what a load of crap!

Dude. take it easy. I don't profess to know all about computers. That was just my impression, AS AN ORDINARY CONSUMER, hence my question in the first place. Thanks for your insight, but take care of your own loads.

But is it not true that the a 1.6 G5 purchased tomorrow (for example) will only get faster as the OS evolves whereas the G4 will see a limited to nill improvement in comparison? That's what I had in mind about the future. I'm on a budget and trying to get the best value.

[edesignuk]

8GB, and not a byte less :D :p

Seriously, I'd say 512MB-1024MB, maybe more if you are in to serious image/video editing.

[tomf87]

Originally posted by edesignuk
8GB, and not a byte less :D :p

Seriously, I'd say 512MB-1024MB, maybe more if you are in to serious image/video editing.

I was wondering why they didn't give the XServe the ability to address at least 16GB of RAM. I have a SQL cluster and each server has 16GB of RAM, and each instance gets 7.5 GB each. So, if both instances are on one box, I have 15GB used in SQL instances and 1 GB for the OS.

If they are touting the XServe as cluster-able, this seems like an oversight.

[dachshund]

Hey,
after all this poking I think that determining the right amount of RAM for your private machine is rather easy: Just watch your mac: Is there any harddisc accessing noise and simultaneous delay in responsiveness when you are working or especially switching apps? If there is you have a good indicator that you don't have sufficient RAM for your actual tasks. There is even a more simpel method:
Open your Terminal app and type 'top': Above the list is a value called pageins(). These pageins() show how often your RAM could deliver data to the CPU and pageouts() shows how often your Mac had to access the harddrive because of insufficient RAM resources --> virtual memory.
I think none can tell a constant value of RAM that meets the needs of all private users exactly.

- regards

[dachshund]

Besides I must say that it is simply an old rumor in the circle of mac users that adding more RAM to your machine increases its speed. Regardless if you had enough for your running apps before or not.
And determining if you have enough RAM is simpel as I told before. Though this task gets much harder if you have a server running that has great discrepancies in workload or if you have written your own app to solve scientific work. In both cases you often just don't know how much data your app has to process beforehand.

[floatingspirit]

Originally posted by dachshund
Hey,
after all this poking I think that determining the right amount of RAM for your private machine is rather easy: ... There is even a more simpel method:
Open your Terminal app and type 'top': Above the list is a value called pageins(). These pageins() show how often your RAM could deliver data to the CPU and pageouts() shows how often your Mac had to access the harddrive because of insufficient RAM resources --> virtual memory.

Hmmm, particularly this, but the rest of your post as well, was interesting and very practical advice. Thanks!

[floatingspirit]

I only have 7 apps open (including terminal) and it says the comp is using 475M with 164M free. Assuming those are in megabytes, it looks like 1 Gig of ram wouldn't be too much at all. I didn't have any pageins until the comp woke from sleep. Interesting...

[dachshund]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
I only have 7 apps open (including terminal) and it says the comp is using 475M with 164M free. Assuming those are in megabytes, it looks like 1 Gig of ram wouldn't be too much at all. I didn't have any pageins until the comp woke from sleep. Interesting...

Your're right the unit is Megabyte.
Did you really had no pageINs() ?? That would mean, that your computer had to load every data from HD and not from RAM. Sounds very odd. Though having some pageouts() is just the norm. Thereby I guess "some" is a value between 0 and 1000 with youor amount of RAM installed. Closing there is something noteworthy: You're computer counts the pageins and outs even if you don't run 'top' the whole time.


regards

[floatingspirit]

Originally posted by dachshund
Your're right the unit is Megabyte.
Did you really had no pageINs() ??

Sorry, I meant no pageOUTS!!! After waking from sleep, it registered 5. Good think I don't work for NASA!!

[dachshund]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
Sorry, I meant no pageOUTS!!! After waking from sleep, it registered 5. Good think I don't work for NASA!!

If like to get some insight in memory management and then start at NASA :) then take a look on:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Memory/Memory-2.html

[iindigo]

Hey, I have 128Mb on an archaic 400mhz indigo iMac, and I run Photoshop CS, iTunes, Safari, Dreamweaver, Blender3D, Apple Developer Tools, Mail.app, ThemePark, iChat, REALBasic, and occasionally the Terminal. ATM I'm running Jaguar and plan to upgrade to Panther.

Should I upgrade my RAM/How much should I upgrade it to?



Thanks!
iindigo

[dachshund]

Originally posted by iindigo
Hey, I have 128Mb on an archaic 400mhz indigo iMac, and I run Photoshop CS, iTunes, Safari, Dreamweaver, Blender3D, Apple Developer Tools, Mail.app, ThemePark, iChat, REALBasic, and occasionally the Terminal. ATM I'm running Jaguar and plan to upgrade to Panther.

Should I upgrade my RAM/How much should I upgrade it to?



Thanks!
iindigo

Insofar as I know Mac OS X consumes 128 MByte RAM itself. Therefor I would recommend upgrading anyway. Depending on how many of these apps you're running at the same time you should consider adding 256 or 512 MB RAM. You may also try the method described above in this thread. There is also an empirical formula for Photoshop editing: The memory Photoshop eats plus four times the memory of the average image size you're editing. That means for a 10 MByte image that you need 64 MB + 40 MB = 104 MB to run Photoshops threads in RAM only. Therefore you would need 104 + 128 = 232 MB of RAM to handle Photoshop and Mac OS X at the same time.

- regards

[yamabushi]

iindigo - I think you should add 512MB. You will notice the difference.

When running applications on OSX most people will notice a dramatic difference when upgrading to 512MB or more from 256MB or less.

[virividox]

todays apps are ram hungry and this only gets worse as u multitask, so 512 and above should soon become standard i think