Benefit of extra RAM for Xcode and Handbrake

[LastLine]

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Hey all,

I have a mid 2010 i3 21.5" iMac. It comes stock with 4gb of RAM.

I've just had a nice tax return and I'm considering expanding by adding another 8 to take it to 12gb, or replacing the lot and going to 16gb. Will this give me a noticeable difference in encoding performance in handbrake, and Xcode performance, or is there something else I should be considering?

 

[santaliqueur]

You probably won't notice a difference at all. The 16GB memory would be nice, but Handbrake or Xcode performance is not very memory hungry.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hey all,

I have a mid 2010 i3 21.5" iMac. It comes stock with 4gb of RAM.

I've just had a nice tax return and I'm considering expanding by adding another 8 to take it to 12gb, or replacing the lot and going to 16gb. Will this give me a noticeable difference in encoding performance in handbrake, and Xcode performance, or is there something else I should be considering?

 

[LastLine]

You probably won't notice a difference at all. The 16GB memory would be nice, but Handbrake or Xcode performance is not very memory hungry.

No? I'd have thought RAM would have been quite handy in Xcode? It seems to be quite the resource hog at times.

 

[santaliqueur]

No? I'd have thought RAM would have been quite handy in Xcode? It seems to be quite the resource hog at times.

I'm sure it wouldn't hurt, but over a certain amount, you hit the point of diminishing returns. I'd be surprised if 16GB was any better than 8 for Xcode. Handbrake won't make any difference at all with more memory.