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8GB memory upgrade needed?

D

Dizzie20vt

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 28, 2009
58
0
Hi guys

I've had my 15" i7 2.66 MBP for 6 months now and love it to bits. I wanted the 8GB from birth, but with the price as they were at the time couldn't justify the extra £320 to do it. Now Crucial are showing it at £123. Much more wallet friendly and I can pass my 4GB down to the mrs for her unibody MB.

I use my MBP every day at work and generally I end up with a lot of programs idling most of the day, but are needed regularly for short periods of time. Right now my activity monitor for memory is reading:

Free: 200.4mb
Wired: 666.5mb
Active: 2.23gb
inactive 818.9mb
used: 3.68gb

Does this mean I'm pretty much using up all of my RAM and the 8GB upgrade would be worth it?
 
VM size: 144.51GB
Page ins: 18.59GB
Page outs: 1.37GB
Swap used: 834.6MB

Then under the pie it says 3.88GB
 
That's not too much page outs but since you have use for your existing RAM, go ahead and do it. Both of you will benefit from it
 
Hellhammer said:
That's not too much page outs but since you have use for your existing RAM, go ahead and do it. Both of you will benefit from it
Click to expand...

... and as a general tip, when you see the *Free* RAM figure, read it instead as *Wasted* RAM. OS X's attitude to RAM is that free memory is wasted memory.

OS X itself and the applications you run should be trying to use as much memory as possible to increase their responsiveness. Things like disk, icon and graphics caches should extend as much as they can to ensure that the machine is as responsive as possible.

Of course, should an existing or newly-launched application require that RAM, then running apps will trim their caches appropriately to free up space.

Your 200MB free figure isn't necessarily a sign of running out of memory, hence the questions about what your page in/page out figures are. They're an indicator that non-disposable chunks of memory (i.e. not caches or other transient data) are having to be pushed out to the hard drive to make room. That's bad :)
 
yeah I did some reading into what Page Ins/outs are after you asked for those :)

when launching photoshop for example my page outs don't change so I guess I have enough RAM at the moment. Naturally more is always better, but it's not starved for memory at the moment
 
If you have "free" memory and you don't have lots of pageouts, then, you don't need more than 4 GB. Sorry to break it to you. ;) But, the mrs probably does need 4 GB, so, I would go ahead and do the upgrade anyway :D Seriously, unless you are running a few special programs, 4 GB is sufficient.
 
I use the £123 Crucial Ram in my MBP i7 and it works.

DO NOT buy the Kingston stuff for around £160, even if it tempts you with its hynix chips. I had mega kernel panic problems with it and ended up sending it back.

The crucial stuff = good
 
6 days uptime. dunno if that makes much difference.

my daily work programs all get closed at night and I play world of warcraft. then all opened again at the end of the day.

I think for the money I may aswell do it anyway
 
Installed 8gb about an hour ago and it's certainly noticeabley improved. Everything feels smoothy swapping programs. Might just be in my mind though lol

Activity monitor hasn't done any page outs yet and I'm running 10 programs including world of warcraft. it's even got 4.4gb free memory lol

only £75 so worth it imo.
 
Isn't it you really, really need to upgrade the RAM once your page outs exceed your page ins? 1.37GB page outs seems like a big need for RAM. Correct me if I am wrong, but page outs are related to virtual memory, which is used because sufficient physical memory is not free for all tasks, correct?
 
NickZac said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but page outs are related to virtual memory, which is used because sufficient physical memory is not free for all tasks, correct?
Click to expand...
Usually, yes. Items are "paged in" to the RAM as programs need them, but if there's not enough RAM to hold everything, then the system will "page out" items to the swap, paging them back in as they're needed (which induces noticeable slow-down). However, I've occasionally experienced a growing swap even with a good amount of free memory available. Whether it indicates poor programming, weird program behavior, or something else, I'm not sure.
 
I am usually between 40-80k page ins and 0 page outs. With that said, after not restarting for a few weeks, the amount of 'inactive' memory gets very high (Gigabytes) and the page-outs eventually increase until I restart it. It seems when memory is Inactive that it causes a slowdown although I didn't think that was supposed to have any real effect on the overall system:confused:
 
well. I've been using 8gb ram for the whole day and I'm really finding the macbook responds better than better. things feel smoother and I'm sure I'm seeing less beachballs that previously
 
Since I'm also wondering the same question, I think I'll post here.
So far I have 52.57GB of Page Ins/19.2MB of page outs. What does that mean? Should I upgrade?
 
wordoflife said:
Since I'm also wondering the same question, I think I'll post here.
So far I have 52.57GB of Page Ins/19.2MB of page outs. What does that mean? Should I upgrade?
Click to expand...

Out of your existing physical memory, how much of it is 'free'? (the green in the Activity Monitor)
 
NickZac said:
Out of your existing physical memory, how much of it is 'free'? (the green in the Activity Monitor)
Click to expand...

Depends. When I'm actually trying to do work, its about 400-500MB. Right now I just have this page open in Chrome, with Preview, iTunes, Firefox and Twitter running in the dock and I have 1.1GB free.
I guess I don't need to upgrade. The prices are very addicting though.
 
Windows Small Business Server 2008

I just tried to install Windows Small Business Server 2008 to a virtual machine in Parallels, and couldn't do it because SMB wants a minimum of 4 Gb RAM all to itself. (I tried giving it that much, and got a warning my Mac and the VM could slow to a crawl, and of course they did.) So thanks to Windows (!) I now have an excuse to upgrade to 8Gb!
 
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