MBA 13 - 4 gb memory barely enough.....

[neteng101]

I routinely have 5 or 6 tabs open in Chrome and it is anything but horrible. At the moment, I have 6 tabs open in Chrome and the Activity Monitor tells me that it is using less than 1 percent of the CPU's capacity.

How much memory total is those 6 Chrome tabs costing you? 328MB with 8 open tabs (and 4 of those with Javascript heavy elements) in Firefox for me, which has been running for a few days, and has a bunch of addons installed as well.

Just curious. I've tried Chrome in the past and the memory usage was just too much for what I do. I swear something changed recently with Firefox though - I think its 10.6.5 actually - that reduced its memory footprint.

 

[revelated]

Photoshop CS5 runs flawlessly on the MBA 13".

Put it this way.

If I owned a Ford F350 and a Chrysler T&C, and I wanted to buy a 65" flat panel, I'm not going to take the T&C to get it home. Could I finagle it? Sure. But why bother when the F350 has plenty of room to deal with it?

Could I cook pancakes in a boiling pot? Sure. Is it easy? No. That's what skillets are for.

Could I put water on my cereal and eat it? Sure. Why bother when I could just use milk which tastes better?

If my job is 50 miles away, there's no logical reason to get a SMART car.


Paging is NOT good for any drive. I don't care if it's platter based or SSD. Paging should be minimized at all times. Paging is a decrepit holdover from the days when the strongest machines maxed out at 512MB of RAM. In this era of relatively inexpensive RAM, paging should be minimized and ideally eliminated, as it is a strong contributor to the short lifespan of most drives.

The Air is designed for casual users. Despite whether its hard drive happens to be strong enough to deal with intensive processes that is not what it's designed for. That's why the Pro line exists. That's why the iMac and Mac Pro exist. Again though, if you want to use it that way, do you.

 

[gwsat]

How much memory total is those 6 Chrome tabs costing you? 328MB with 8 open tabs (and 4 of those with Javascript heavy elements) in Firefox for me, which has been running for a few days, and has a bunch of addons installed as well.

Just curious. I've tried Chrome in the past and the memory usage was just too much for what I do. I swear something changed recently with Firefox though - I think its 10.6.5 actually - that reduced its memory footprint.

Right now with 6 tabs open, Activity Monitor indicates that All Chrome processes add up to about 380MB,, which doesn't seem excessive.

The Air is designed for casual users. Despite whether its hard drive happens to be strong enough to deal with intensive processes that is not what it's designed for. That's why the Pro line exists. That's why the iMac and Mac Pro exist. Again though, if you want to use it that way, do you.

I am anything but a casual user and after 6 weeks of heavily using a 13 inch Ultimate MBA I have concluded that it runs a suite of both Windows apps under Fusion and OS X simultaneously as speedily and with as much stability as my MBA with 6GB of RAM does. Keep in mind that "Macbook Pro" is a term of copy writers, not one of art.

Only time will tell whether the paging that is required for my setup will ultimately cause the speed of the MBA's flash memory to degrade. Considering though that even slower flash memory will still be exponentially faster than the fastest electromechanical hard drive, I am not very worried.

 

[neteng101]

Right now with 6 tabs open, Activity Monitor indicates that All Chrome processes add up to about 380MB,, which doesn't seem excessive.

Not bad at all... 4GB is really plenty for a lot of applications given a person that knows what they're doing or looking at.

This is for Skype users - please turn off animated emoticons if you text Skype chat a lot. Those emoticons are a huge CPU drain.

 

[xlii]

This guy has a great explanation of what page outs & page ins are.

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-s...somebody-please-explain-me-idiot-fashion.html

 

[gwsat]

Not bad at all... 4GB is really plenty for a lot of applications given a person that knows what they're doing or looking at.

I can't tell you how relieved I was to confirm that my MBA's 4GB of RAM could handle a bunch of Windows apps and another bunch of OS X apps, including Chrome, running simultaneously with as much speed and stability as my MBP with 6GB of RAM does. Flash memory is a game changer. Although I have a few page outs, they rarely amount to more than about 1 or 2 percent of the number of page ins and the flash memory's great speed makes them completely unnoticeable.

This guy has a great explanation of what page outs & page ins are.

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-s...somebody-please-explain-me-idiot-fashion.html

Thanks, that was a very interesting thread. Unless I missed it, no poster to the linked thread claimed that paging could damage a hard drive. In fact I had never seen such an assertion anywhere until a poster to this thread claimed that paging was damaging to both hard drives and flash memory. I suppose it's possible but I remain unconvinced.

 

[Hellhammer]

Thanks, that was a very interesting thread. Unless I missed it, no poster to the linked thread claimed that paging could damage a hard drive. In fact I had never seen such an assertion anywhere until a poster to this thread claimed that paging was damaging to both hard drives and flash memory. I suppose it's possible but I remain unconvinced.

Paging is just normal read and write activity. Write data (page out), read data (page in). It doesn't matter is it a page or any other file.

Heavy paging may, however, decrease the lifespan as the HD/SSD will wear out sooner. It's not something that I would worry about though since the amount of data that is used due to paging is relatively small. In the end, HDs and SSDs are made for use.

 

[gwsat]

Paging is just normal read and write activity. Write data (page out), read data (page in). It doesn't matter is it a page or any other file.

Heavy paging may, however, decrease the lifespan as the HD/SSD will wear out sooner. It's not something that I would worry about though since the amount of data that is used due to paging is relatively small. In the end, HDs and SSDs are made for use.

This has always been my understanding, too. My swap file always starts out at 128MB and never exceeds 1GB. As a 1GB swap file represents less than .25 percent of the MBA's 250GB total usable storage space, I can't imagine that it presents a serious problem. Spare us all from those who are frequently wrong but never in doubt.

 

[bniu]

I was going to buy an Air to replace my Pro, but after seeing my Pro speed up significantly after going to 8Gigs of RAM, I knew I was better off just buying a SSD and put that in my Pro. While the Air is nice, you just can't beat 8 Gigs of RAM! (unless you have 16!)

 

[2pxbTony]

13inch Macbook air 1.86, with 4GB ram

A typical scenario for me on a given day will be, I have Photoshop cs5, fireworks and dreamweaver running, itune is playing music, iCal open, Address book open, Billing open , safari ( at least 5 tabs), fontbook open, adium open for IM. My macbook air can handle this flawless