Another RAM question - Page Outs related

[ATC]

My early '09 24" iMac has been running great, especially since installing 10.8. It has a base 4GB RAM config but I think both slots are being used (2x2GB). I'm not a heavy user by any means although I do the occasional marathon photo editing while multi-tasking.

With RAM being so cheap these days I thought I might as well upgrade to 8GB (2x4GB) but I'm wondering if the upgrade will be noticeable. That's when I started reading up on "Activity Monitor", specifically "Page outs".

So from my limited understanding of this, it seems if one gets a lot of Page Outs then it's time for more RAM. The thing that's confusing is how much is "a lot" of page outs?

Currently I'm seeing generally less than 1GB page outs, typically in the 200KB-600KB range.

Would more RAM help or should I not bother?

 

[GGJstudios]

So from my limited understanding of this, it seems if one gets a lot of Page Outs then it's time for more RAM. The thing that's confusing is how much is "a lot" of page outs?

Currently I'm seeing generally less than 1GB page outs, typically in the 200KB-600KB range.

Would more RAM help or should I not bother?

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[ATC]

Thanks for the reply. So I take it from your post that I won't benefit from extra RAM, as my page outs (at least so far) have been less than 1GB (~200KB-600KB).

 

[GGJstudios]

Thanks for the reply. So I take it from your post that I won't benefit from extra RAM, as my page outs (at least so far) have been less than 1GB (~200KB-600KB).

Exactly. I doubt you'd notice any difference, if that's your normal workload.

 

[ATC]

Great thanks, you've saved me a few bucks.