How much RAM is really necessary?

[dachshund]

determining RAM for private machines

Hey,
after all this poking I think that determining the right amount of RAM for your private machine is rather easy: Just watch your mac: Is there any harddisc accessing noise and simultaneous delay in responsiveness when you are working or especially switching apps? If there is you have a good indicator that you don't have sufficient RAM for your actual tasks. There is even a more simpel method:
Open your Terminal app and type 'top': Above the list is a value called pageins(). These pageins() show how often your RAM could deliver data to the CPU and pageouts() shows how often your Mac had to access the harddrive because of insufficient RAM resources --> virtual memory.
I think none can tell a constant value of RAM that meets the needs of all private users exactly.

- regards

 

[dachshund]

addendum

Besides I must say that it is simply an old rumor in the circle of mac users that adding more RAM to your machine increases its speed. Regardless if you had enough for your running apps before or not.
And determining if you have enough RAM is simpel as I told before. Though this task gets much harder if you have a server running that has great discrepancies in workload or if you have written your own app to solve scientific work. In both cases you often just don't know how much data your app has to process beforehand.

 

[floatingspirit]

Re: determining RAM for private machines

Originally posted by dachshund
Hey,
after all this poking I think that determining the right amount of RAM for your private machine is rather easy: ... There is even a more simpel method:
Open your Terminal app and type 'top': Above the list is a value called pageins(). These pageins() show how often your RAM could deliver data to the CPU and pageouts() shows how often your Mac had to access the harddrive because of insufficient RAM resources --> virtual memory.

Hmmm, particularly this, but the rest of your post as well, was interesting and very practical advice. Thanks!

 

[floatingspirit]

I only have 7 apps open (including terminal) and it says the comp is using 475M with 164M free. Assuming those are in megabytes, it looks like 1 Gig of ram wouldn't be too much at all. I didn't have any pageins until the comp woke from sleep. Interesting...

 

[dachshund]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
I only have 7 apps open (including terminal) and it says the comp is using 475M with 164M free. Assuming those are in megabytes, it looks like 1 Gig of ram wouldn't be too much at all. I didn't have any pageins until the comp woke from sleep. Interesting...

Your're right the unit is Megabyte.
Did you really had no pageINs() ?? That would mean, that your computer had to load every data from HD and not from RAM. Sounds very odd. Though having some pageouts() is just the norm. Thereby I guess "some" is a value between 0 and 1000 with youor amount of RAM installed. Closing there is something noteworthy: You're computer counts the pageins and outs even if you don't run 'top' the whole time.


regards

 

[floatingspirit]

Originally posted by dachshund
Your're right the unit is Megabyte.
Did you really had no pageINs() ??

Sorry, I meant no pageOUTS!!! After waking from sleep, it registered 5. Good think I don't work for NASA!!

 

[dachshund]

Originally posted by floatingspirit
Sorry, I meant no pageOUTS!!! After waking from sleep, it registered 5. Good think I don't work for NASA!!

If like to get some insight in memory management and then start at NASA then take a look on:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Memory/Memory-2.html

 

[iindigo]

Hey, I have 128Mb on an archaic 400mhz indigo iMac, and I run Photoshop CS, iTunes, Safari, Dreamweaver, Blender3D, Apple Developer Tools, Mail.app, ThemePark, iChat, REALBasic, and occasionally the Terminal. ATM I'm running Jaguar and plan to upgrade to Panther.

Should I upgrade my RAM/How much should I upgrade it to?



Thanks!
iindigo

 

[dachshund]

Originally posted by iindigo
Hey, I have 128Mb on an archaic 400mhz indigo iMac, and I run Photoshop CS, iTunes, Safari, Dreamweaver, Blender3D, Apple Developer Tools, Mail.app, ThemePark, iChat, REALBasic, and occasionally the Terminal. ATM I'm running Jaguar and plan to upgrade to Panther.

Should I upgrade my RAM/How much should I upgrade it to?



Thanks!
iindigo

Insofar as I know Mac OS X consumes 128 MByte RAM itself. Therefor I would recommend upgrading anyway. Depending on how many of these apps you're running at the same time you should consider adding 256 or 512 MB RAM. You may also try the method described above in this thread. There is also an empirical formula for Photoshop editing: The memory Photoshop eats plus four times the memory of the average image size you're editing. That means for a 10 MByte image that you need 64 MB + 40 MB = 104 MB to run Photoshops threads in RAM only. Therefore you would need 104 + 128 = 232 MB of RAM to handle Photoshop and Mac OS X at the same time.

- regards

 

[yamabushi]

iindigo - I think you should add 512MB. You will notice the difference.

When running applications on OSX most people will notice a dramatic difference when upgrading to 512MB or more from 256MB or less.

 

[virividox]

todays apps are ram hungry and this only gets worse as u multitask, so 512 and above should soon become standard i think