Benefits of extra memory?

[adriantoll]

I was doing some audio editing tonight, and found that my 17" PowerBook was chugging a bit, converting from AAC to AIFF. I've got 1Gb of RAM at the moment, as 1 SO-DIMM, so I can theoretically just buy another 1Gb of RAM and drop it in. But is it really worth it for £200+? Will I actually notice seriously better performance?

 

[jackieonasses]

The performance will not be as big as it would be from lets say, 512 to 1gig. It might make a difference on a dual Power Mac. But on a Powerbook, I doubt it would make a difference that is worth the price.

 

[JOD8FY]

That should be enough RAM - I'm surprised that it's "chugging" 😛. I don't think that an extra gig is worth the money though, you really should have enough.

JOD8FY

 

[Sun Baked]

I was doing some audio editing tonight, and found that my 17" PowerBook was chugging a bit, converting from AAC to AIFF. I've got 1Gb of RAM at the moment, as 1 SO-DIMM, so I can theoretically just buy another 1Gb of RAM and drop it in. But is it really worth it for £200+? Will I actually notice seriously better performance?

Go to Terminal and type in vm_stat

Look at pageouts... is it a big number?

Should be done after a normal session of use -- after a reboot (probably without sleeping).

Unless you have a high pageout number, you're most likely not resorting to having to use the VM Manager to much.

---

Unless your seriously getting slammed by the VM Manager at a HD's 50MB/s bandwidth, then the boost you'd get by real memory's 1GB/s bandwidth (sustained G4) won't be there -- just something you may use every now and then.

 

[~Shard~]

Was going to recommend the vm_stat as well, but Sun Baked beat me to it. In general, you can never have too much RAM, but with 1 GB in there already, you shouldn't be having too many issues doing what you're doing - it's not like you're doing 3D rendering and all that.

I always like recommending more memory to people since it's usually worth it and makes a noticeable difference, but a 17" PB with 1 GB RAM should be pretty fast as it is, so I'm not sure if there's another issue to cause your machine to chug... 😕

 

[adriantoll]

Thanks for your replies. Perhaps I'm just expecting too much! It doesn't seem to be having problems with anything else really, so I guess it's not worth the extra cash. I'll see how it goes...

 

[~Shard~]

Thanks for your replies. Perhaps I'm just expecting too much! It doesn't seem to be having problems with anything else really, so I guess it's not worth the extra cash. I'll see how it goes...

Yah, in your situation I would advise against getting the extra RAM – it’s not like you’re struggling with only 256 MB or 512 MB! Keep at it, but if problems persist, you may want to investigate further – perhaps it isn’t solely your RAM’s fault, for whatever reason...

 

[acceber]

Go to Terminal and type in vm_stat

Look at pageouts... is it a big number?

Should be done after a normal session of use -- after a reboot (probably without sleeping).

Unless you have a high pageout number, you're most likely not resorting to having to use the VM Manager to much.

---

Unless your seriously getting slammed by the VM Manager at a HD's 50MB/s bandwidth, then the boost you'd get by real memory's 1GB/s bandwidth (sustained G4) won't be there -- just something you may use every now and then.

I've got an iBook with 256 ram. How do i know if the pageout number if "high"? What's the guidelines?