5K Imac - Ram upgrade worth it? Email lags!

[irock101]

Hey,

I just bought a 5k Retina Imac. So far so good and the performance is plenty for me. I don't do much beside the normal webmaster stuff. Google chrome, Skype, MacMail, Word, iTunes are the apps that are always open.
I noticed a lag when getting my emails or in general when changing settings in MacMail. Is this a specific MacMail issue or do I need more RAM to keep up with the workload?

Was thinking about buying 4x8gb sticks since the prices are really low these days, but if it doesn't fix the Mail issue, I am pissing money away basically.

Any thoughts ?

 

[ApolloBoy]

8 GB is more than enough for an email program, I highly doubt that's your issue.

 

[irock101]

Thanks, I kinda thought that too.
Must be some general issue with MacMail. I only have like 9 accounts in there but it lags constantly.

 

[jerwin]

Look at your Activity Monitor.

It's very difficult for me to use more than 13 gigabytes of memory. My Memory pressure is always green. Note that even though I have gobs and gobs of memory (and some programs will happily consume as much as they can), Mail is purring away quite happily at 155 MB. I only use two accounts, though.

But if on your computer, Mail demands gigs of memory, and your memory pressure is consistently yellow or red, then Ram might help. Otherwise, it's probably something else that's gone wrong, and Ram won't help.

 

[fathergll]

Look at your Activity Monitor.

View attachment 571485
It's very difficult for me to use more than 13 gigabytes of memory. My Memory pressure is always green. Note that even though I have gobs and gobs of memory (and some programs will happily consume as much as they can), Mail is purring away quite happily at 155 MB. I only use two accounts, though.

But if on your computer, Mail demands gigs of memory, and your memory pressure is consistently yellow or red, then Ram might help. Otherwise, it's probably something else that's gone wrong, and Ram won't help.

Possible his CPU is being taxed heavily? Historically my biggest issues have been with cpu being chewed up by some process.

 

[jerwin]

Possible his CPU is being taxed heavily?

The 3.5 Ghz i5 is a perfectly respectable CPU.

However, my Mail instance does use 14 threads, so it is plausible that hyper-threading might be of some benefit, if Mail occupying some unrealistic percentage of CPU.

In any case, Activity Monitor might reveal the culprit-- CPU, memory, or disk.

 

[fathergll]

The 3.5 Ghz i5 is a perfectly respectable CPU.

However, my Mail instance does use 14 threads, so it is plausible that hyper-threading might be of some benefit, if Mail occupying some unrealistic percentage of CPU.

In any case, Activity Monitor might reveal the culprit-- CPU, memory, or disk.

I've had my 3.5 Ghz i5 get crushed on certain websites causing my browser to eat up CPU high enough to make my system crawl.

 

[jerwin]

what websites might those be?