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How much RAM? Macworld performs an analysis.

Umbongo

Umbongo

macrumors 601
Sep 14, 2006
4,934
55
England
Well yeah most single applications don't use a lot of RAM / most users don't load in massive amounts of data, but many multi-application work flows can improve with more memory. Thankfully they included a note about using activity monitor.
 
Jessica Lares

Jessica Lares

macrumors G3
Oct 31, 2009
9,612
1,056
Near Dallas, Texas, USA
That's such a BS study. The average user only needs 4GB to begin with. And yeah, the stock apps are made to use 2GB-4, and it even states that in requirements. And again, you aren't going to notice the difference unless you do work with files and apps that considerably benefit from that 16GB.

People need to realize that a lot of it mostly has to do with your hard drive, and not RAM in general. Especially when you're unzipping and importing files. I have a RAID in my Power Mac G5, and it's pretty impressive. The drives are probably much better than what it shipped with, and it's a good 300GB. So there's a lot of room for the scratch disk and temp space. It only has 512MB of RAM and Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator run like a dream.

Now on my iMac G4, it has an older hard drive, the one that it originally shipped with. It's a little laggy, and it takes awhile to import. But it has nothing to do with the RAM, it's just because it's an old hard drive.

A simple hard drive upgrade can solve a lot of laggy issues people have. Whether it be a traditional HDD that has a better rpm (7200) or a SSD (also with good speeds). If you're doing a lot of importing and having issues with it, better reading/writing from your drive is really what you're after.
 
johnnnw

johnnnw

macrumors 65816
Feb 7, 2013
1,214
21
Jessica Lares said:
That's such a BS study. The average user only needs 4GB to begin with. And yeah, the stock apps are made to use 2GB-4, and it even states that in requirements. And again, you aren't going to notice the difference unless you do work with files and apps that considerably benefit from that 16GB.

People need to realize that a lot of it mostly has to do with your hard drive, and not RAM in general. Especially when you're unzipping and importing files. I have a RAID in my Power Mac G5, and it's pretty impressive. The drives are probably much better than what it shipped with, and it's a good 300GB. So there's a lot of room for the scratch disk and temp space. It only has 512MB of RAM and Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator run like a dream.

Now on my iMac G4, it has an older hard drive, the one that it originally shipped with. It's a little laggy, and it takes awhile to import. But it has nothing to do with the RAM, it's just because it's an old hard drive.

A simple hard drive upgrade can solve a lot of laggy issues people have. Whether it be a traditional HDD that has a better rpm (7200) or a SSD (also with good speeds). If you're doing a lot of importing and having issues with it, better reading/writing from your drive is really what you're after.
Click to expand...

I agree with you about the HDD's being a large problem in affecting speed. However 4GB of ram is also pretty out dated for almost anyone in my opinon. Once you have Spotify, iTunes and Safari open you're almost there with about maybe 100-200MB free. Not enough. My mom sometimes can exceed 4gb's and start page outs.

I think 8GB has become the new standard. At 8GB no basic user will hit that. 4GB these days is cutting it close no matter what you do.
 
Jessica Lares

Jessica Lares

macrumors G3
Oct 31, 2009
9,612
1,056
Near Dallas, Texas, USA
johnnnw said:
I agree with you about the HDD's being a large problem in affecting speed. However 4GB of ram is also pretty out dated for almost anyone in my opinon. Once you have Spotify, iTunes and Safari open you're almost there with about maybe 100-200MB free. Not enough. My mom sometimes can exceed 4gb's and start page outs.

I think 8GB has become the new standard. At 8GB no basic user will hit that. 4GB these days is cutting it close no matter what you do.
Click to expand...

True. I would argue that Safari has memory leak issues though. If it handled it, it would be less of an issue with it in particular. There's no reason why it should remember something I wrote 20 pages back.
 
glenthompson

glenthompson

macrumors demi-god
Apr 27, 2011
2,983
842
Virginia
I have 8gb and never run into memory issues unless I'm running Parallels. Running lots of Mac apps my PageOuts are zero. Do anything in Windows and I'm showing a lot of PageOuts.

My best performance boost came from installing a Samsung 840 Pro.
 
talmy

talmy

macrumors 601
Original poster
Oct 26, 2009
4,726
332
Oregon
Jessica Lares said:
That's such a BS study. The average user only needs 4GB to begin with. And yeah, the stock apps are made to use 2GB-4, and it even states that in requirements. And again, you aren't going to notice the difference unless you do work with files and apps that considerably benefit from that 16GB.
Click to expand...

Did you read the study? It says what you say -- most people will get no noticeable benefit with more than 4GB. Three of our Macs do just fine with just 2GB!
 
W

Windowsrefugee

macrumors regular
Mar 14, 2011
161
7
Microsoft Land
Word memory problems???

I have 4 GB memory on a 2011 MBA 'ultimate' (maxed out) that has a BIG problem with Word eating up memory exponentially and then crashing. It usually happens when I am using track changes editing a 20-50 page Word doc that has a few tables and graphs. Over the course of an hour or so the memory continues to be 'eaten up' until Word crashes and I lose the last 15-20 minutes of work if I do not remember to close the document and Word before that happens. Is this "memory leak" as mentioned by one poster re Safari? I have asked both Apple and MS and they say it is the others' fault. So I am stuck with this big and wonder if a new MBA with 8 GB memory would help. I usually have about 6 other apps running including Safari, but closing them may slightly delay but not prevent the problem. Thoughts?
 
Jessica Lares

Jessica Lares

macrumors G3
Oct 31, 2009
9,612
1,056
Near Dallas, Texas, USA
talmy said:
Did you read the study? It says what you say -- most people will get no noticeable benefit with more than 4GB. Three of our Macs do just fine with just 2GB!
Click to expand...

Yes. But was it worth it? I don't think so. ;) And yeah, my MBP is the only one with 4GB. I was using my dad's work Toshiba the other day, and that has 2GB. It is really, really slow though! And in that case again, I'd say it's the hard drive.

Windowsrefugee said:
I have 4 GB memory on a 2011 MBA 'ultimate' (maxed out) that has a BIG problem with Word eating up memory exponentially and then crashing. It usually happens when I am using track changes editing a 20-50 page Word doc that has a few tables and graphs. Over the course of an hour or so the memory continues to be 'eaten up' until Word crashes and I lose the last 15-20 minutes of work if I do not remember to close the document and Word before that happens. Is this "memory leak" as mentioned by one poster re Safari? I have asked both Apple and MS and they say it is the others' fault. So I am stuck with this big and wonder if a new MBA with 8 GB memory would help. I usually have about 6 other apps running including Safari, but closing them may slightly delay but not prevent the problem. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Try closing Safari. Or get used to using and closing tabs. Safari keeps everything you type in a tab in memory, meaning if that I were to write up 20 forum posts in one go in one tab, it'd still have it in memory. It helps to close it, and then open up a new tab for that reason. Safari also screenshots every page you go on. I always have more than 2GB in my cache every week.

And so yeah, I'd definitely try and see if not having Safari in the background helps before upgrading, but maybe try changing your habits with it/other programs too. What else do you have open?

Word shouldn't do that to you. It's meant to deal with heavily formatted documents. There should be cache settings in there that you can tweak if necessary. I would agree that it's an Apple issue.
 
spatlese44

spatlese44

macrumors 6502
Dec 13, 2007
461
110
Milwaukee
Windowsrefugee said:
So I am stuck with this big and wonder if a new MBA with 8 GB memory would help. I usually have about 6 other apps running including Safari, but closing them may slightly delay but not prevent the problem. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

For starter, you should go into preferences, save, and change your auto recover to something faster than 15 minutes. I'm the secretary for a car club I'm in and wouldn't want to lose 15 minutes of notes so I have mine set for 2 minutes.

As for the memory leak, go into activity monitor and see what process is growing if any.
 
C

cube

Suspended
May 10, 2004
17,011
4,972
One thing is for sure, no laptop should be sold with less than 8GB of soldered memory, except 0.

Soldered memory is unacceptable.
 
Last edited:
Hellhammer

Hellhammer

Moderator emeritus
Dec 10, 2008
22,164
582
Finland
The problem with MacWorld's benchmarks is that they are only running individual tasks. The point about RAM is that you can run multiple apps simultaneously without lag because each app will obviously take its share of the available RAM. The more RAM you have, the more apps you can run simultaneously. Running a single app for benchmarking will not simulate this because it's unlikely that the app has been designed to use up all the RAM (there are exceptions like Photoshop when working with huge files).
 
W

Windowsrefugee

macrumors regular
Mar 14, 2011
161
7
Microsoft Land
spatlese44 said:
For starter, you should go into preferences, save, and change your auto recover to something faster than 15 minutes. I'm the secretary for a car club I'm in and wouldn't want to lose 15 minutes of notes so I have mine set for 2 minutes.

As for the memory leak, go into activity monitor and see what process is growing if any.
Click to expand...

It is not Safari that is eating up memory, it is definitely Word. Apple says they don't support 3rd party software while MS says it's Apple's issue....
 
Giuly

Giuly

macrumors 68040
Oct 16, 2009
3,348
4
That depends whether you ask for timezone, state o
They should've tested Safari.
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One window, four tabs. 4GB was never sufficient for me for normal usage, and even 8GB paged-out under heavy use.
 
Cheffy Dave

Cheffy Dave

macrumors 68030
Feb 5, 2007
2,646
309
Sunny Florida, on the Gulf Coast in Homosassa Fl
Hellhammer said:
The problem with MacWorld's benchmarks is that they are only running individual tasks. The point about RAM is that you can run multiple apps simultaneously without lag because each app will obviously take its share of the available RAM. The more RAM you have, the more apps you can run simultaneously. Running a single app for benchmarking will not simulate this because it's unlikely that the app has been designed to use up all the RAM (there are exceptions like Photoshop when working with huge files).
Click to expand...

I agree HH, I always max out Ram, pending on device, have since Windows 3.1, and Mac OS leopard
 
melchior

melchior

macrumors 65816
Nov 17, 2002
1,237
115
while pageouts indicate the limits of your ram, the performance difference is not significant.

tests i wish they had done would be in manipulating half terabyte itunes and aperture libraries or batch development of jpgs from raw in aperture.

i am thinking of buying a rmbp later this year and without knowing what will be offered, if the difference between 8gb and 16gb remains i would like to know how my applications such as those above compare.

has anyone ever tried putting the itunes library files on a ramdisk?
 
T

theluggage

macrumors 604
Jul 29, 2011
7,507
7,398
melchior said:
tests i wish they had done would be in manipulating half terabyte itunes and aperture libraries or batch development of jpgs from raw in aperture.

has anyone ever tried putting the itunes library files on a ramdisk?
Click to expand...

Did you mean SSD? ('ramdisk' usually means a temporary virtual disk drive created in system RAM - you'd need a lot of RAM to store a half-terabyte iTunes library!).

At a guess, using an all-SSD system would dramatically speed up such things. However, at current prices that's a lot of SSD, too - if you have 1GB+ of iTunes and Aperture libraries you're not going to get far with the internal storage on a rMBP. So a more interesting question would be how much having a SSD as your system disc & your libraries on an external TB drive would speed things up (bear in mind that having a SSD system drive will significantly speed up any page-outs that do occur).

What puts me off the current rMBP and iMac lines is not the soldered-in RAM but the difficulty of SSD upgrades. RAM inflation seems to have peaked, so I'm reasonably confident that 16GB will be enough for the foreseeable future. However, I'm equally sure that the next 12-18 months will see terabyte SSDs become far more affordable. You can already get a Cruclal M500 960GB job for less than the Apple rMBP upgrade to 720GB (although, to be fair, not in the tiny form-factor needed by the rMBP). So the SSD capacity of the rMBP is going to become obsolete long before the RAM size.
 
melchior

melchior

macrumors 65816
Nov 17, 2002
1,237
115
theluggage said:
Did you mean SSD? ('ramdisk' usually means a temporary virtual disk drive created in system RAM - you'd need a lot of RAM to store a half-terabyte iTunes library!).

At a guess, using an all-SSD system would dramatically speed up such things. However, at current prices that's a lot of SSD, too - if you have 1GB+ of iTunes and Aperture libraries you're not going to get far with the internal storage on a rMBP. So a more interesting question would be how much having a SSD as your system disc & your libraries on an external TB drive would speed things up (bear in mind that having a SSD system drive will significantly speed up any page-outs that do occur).

What puts me off the current rMBP and iMac lines is not the soldered-in RAM but the difficulty of SSD upgrades. RAM inflation seems to have peaked, so I'm reasonably confident that 16GB will be enough for the foreseeable future. However, I'm equally sure that the next 12-18 months will see terabyte SSDs become far more affordable. You can already get a Cruclal M500 960GB job for less than the Apple rMBP upgrade to 720GB (although, to be fair, not in the tiny form-factor needed by the rMBP). So the SSD capacity of the rMBP is going to become obsolete long before the RAM size.
Click to expand...


no, I actually meant a ramdisk. SSD does not make a big dent on these operations for me, but I have an old computer. boot time is great though... i guess you could say this is the problem of reading and writing non-sequential data.

and as for the itunes library files, i meant the database that stores all the data. only a few hundred MB. i might try this myself when i get a free moment...

for aperture, the problem is reading the previews. but what i am wondering, is about aperture's ability to preload stuff into RAM.

thus the question, only answerable by doing the tests, of any benefit from 8gb vs. 16gb. i tend to doubt it, but i want to know for sure.

when i pull the trigger i may buy two and return one.

also, the SSD can be ugraded, just not with industry standard drives, relying on OWC. which is fine as long as they respond to industry pricing trends. (unlike apple)
 
Last edited:
S

SMDBill

macrumors 6502
Apr 12, 2013
255
1
The article was spot on. On my work computer that has only 3GB RAM, core i5 (2012 dual core) and running Win XP (HP Machine), that thing just comes to a screeching halt as I open more and more applications. In a work setting I may have 3 large spreadsheets open, 2 Word documents, several browser tabs, file manager and other apps. If I were to run those things one at a time the machine would handle it just fine. But my workflow requires many different programs at once so I could definitely benefit from more RAM (and a @$!@# upgrade to Win 7 if for nothing else but the speed improvement of the OS). Unfortunately I don't control that.

Beyond just looking at what apps people may need to use simultaneously, we also need to look at the number of times that same app is in use. Safari on a Mac may need several tabs for research or whatever, Excel may need to be open more than once for work, etc. It's not just how many apps we may have open that will help determine memory needs, but also how much memory we'd require of those apps based on how we're using them.
 
canman4PM

canman4PM

macrumors 6502
Mar 8, 2012
299
30
Kelowna BC
Hellhammer said:
The problem with MacWorld's benchmarks is that they are only running individual tasks. The point about RAM is that you can run multiple apps simultaneously without lag because each app will obviously take its share of the available RAM. The more RAM you have, the more apps you can run simultaneously. Running a single app for benchmarking will not simulate this because it's unlikely that the app has been designed to use up all the RAM (there are exceptions like Photoshop when working with huge files).
Click to expand...

That's what I thought the extra ram was for. So I could run several apps at once, without any loss of speed. I'd never expect a single app to exceed the capabilities of a 4GB RAM'd computer.
 
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