Do I need more memory for my Quad Core Mac Pro?

You need to go to your activity monitor and look at the page outs to page in on the system memory. A high ratio (10%?) would be an indication that more memory would speed up your processes.

10% is a number I remember reading but in my case I am at .002% so maybe someone else has a better number.

 

I think you have more than enough memory, on my 2.4ghz, 4gb ram mbp through a 30" ACD, I have Final Cut express, aperture 2, Apple Mail, iTunes, Firefox with 7 tabs, Quicktime, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, imovie, all open and it is fine. Now if FCE is rendering, different story.

But it never hurts to get more ram, it isn't terribly expensive anyways!

I hope to get a Mac Pro soon!

 

Your question will never yield an accurate answer because regardless of your system and your applications your memory resources will vary from machine to machine and user to user.

Quite frankly you need to download iStat and watch your memory usage. You can run all of the apps you speak of and be just fine but perhaps your hard drive is nearing max capacity and you have not restarted your machine in 180 days. Your memory allocation will undoubtedly be different if you were running on a clean drive and a fresh reboot. So download iStat, watch your memory usage and know that if memory is nearing the max then it's possible that more memory is necessary or you're just keeping apps open for the sake of keeping them open and perhaps you can save your pennies and use command+q more frequently.

 

iStat reports memory as "wired", "active", "inactive" and "free". What do those terms mean?

Edit: answered my own question...