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16 gb ram smoooooth like butter

M

mellofello

Suspended
Original poster
Feb 1, 2011
1,259
556
16 GB is the best $100 upgrade ever! I can't believe how much ram programs are taking these days. I never thought I could touch all 16 gb but running A couple browser windows, Photoshop, and InDesign had me idling at 10 GB. How did I live with a mislay 4 GB?

Best part? I switched back to Firefox. Left it idling over night. Came back this morning to see it using 2.2 GB of ram....

Said "whateves. I have ram to burn, and kept on trucking":D
 
I tell you guys that Adobe products suck up ram:p. People have definitely been taking time to switch over from the mindset used for 32 bit applications. Mechanics like scratch disks, bucket systems, virtual memory, etc. are just ways of working around ram limits. If you have the memory there, it simply works better. Of course if you don't need it, then it's pointless. In your case that sounds like a very cheap performance upgrade.
 
How much ram were you using prior to 16GB?

I ask because my new iMac came with 4GB and I too considered spending less that $100 for 16GB but then I remember, I still had that 4GB I pulled from a 2011 Macbook Pro.

Since it was the same ram, I opted to install it giving me 8GB.

I fired it up and began running some programs, photo editing, video playing, browsing, mail, FaceTime and the like.

All during this testing I was running Activity Monitor to see if I needed more than 8GB.

I know from running Activity Monitor I definitely need more than 4 GB.

Well after three hours of exercising the heck out of the iMac with 8 GB I discovered that 16 GB would not really result in a performance increase.


With 4 GB I saw Page Outs and Swap Use.

With 8 GB I am seeing NO Page Outs and NO Swap Useage.

Looks like I have $100 to spend somewhere else! ;)


.
 
Haha, yeah it is funny how 8GB is really becoming standard and 16GB is just above that.

Of course when I just have Chrome and iTunes open, I don't come anywhere near touching my limit, but with various Adobe applications and a virtual machine, I could see 24GB's coming in handy.
 
I have a new iMac with 4GB of RAM as well. Where can you get 16meg of RAM for $100?
 
I just upgraded my 09 Core 2 Duo to 16GB last week and its nice... How did I ever live with 4 for the last almost three years!!! EEK...
 
I'm asked a few people if 4 GB is enough for runnning applications and serious adobe work. They told me 4 GB is enough, or that you RAM isn't your issue if the system is going slow.

In the back of my mind, I don't know why I listen to them, RAM is always the issue. I'm getting 16mb!
 
moonbeep said:
Was checking some stats earlier and it said my page in's were over 5gb?

Is this right,im not using any intensive programs etc?....
Click to expand...

it runs page in totals for days on end once you do a cold boot it sets the counter again. your page in to page out ratio is what counts..

20 in to 1 out is okay
100 in to 1 out is better.
5 in to 1 out means buy ram


let the count go for 2 or 3 days better yet for 2 or 3 weeks
 
moonbeep said:
Was checking some stats earlier and it said my page in's were over 5gb?

Is this right,im not using any intensive programs etc?....
Click to expand...
Pages ins are almost never an issue, it's page outs that are the issue. Page ins include reading the application off the disk in to memory when you start it.

RIght now after 4 days since the last reboot, I have 5.6 GB page ins and only 48MB page outs. I don't need more memory, but then again I have 8GB.
Yogakun said:
I'm asked a few people if 4 GB is enough for runnning applications and serious adobe work. They told me 4 GB is enough, or that you RAM isn't your issue if the system is going slow.

In the back of my mind, I don't know why I listen to them, RAM is always the issue. I'm getting 16mb!
Click to expand...
If I was buying a new iMac today, I'd add 8GB (non Apple of course) to it and see how it did. If that wasn't enough, then I'd order another 4GB and replace the Apple memory. (Which you need to hold on to for AppleCare service.) This way you spend the money on the memory incrementally and you don't waste the money if you don't need to spend it. But yes, 4GB is not enough.
 
I upgraded from 4 to 12 GB for $50. What a difference!

My 2010 i7 iMac still feels brand new! I love it.
 
I went for 12GB, its weird that when some big programs run they use alot of memory but it is inactive.
 
BornAgainMac said:
I joined the 16 GB club with two of my Macs. What seemed like an insane amount of memory a few years ago feels just right.
Click to expand...

At one point just describing ram in gigabytes seemed like something that would be limited to servers :D. The thing is as we move away from 32 bit application builds, it's possible that we'll see at least a temporary lessened reliance on some of the complex memory workarounds needed in memory intensive applications. Things like bucket systems and scratch disks are really designed to memory constraints. If they're not really constraints, it eventually alleviates the reliance on programming workarounds. More ram could have been used in many cases years before it could be used efficiently. You could install 8GB with tiger or leopard, but it wasn't necessarily practical.
 
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