iMac with 12 gigs of ram still somewhat sluggish

[hkbladelawkhk]

I've got a Late 2009 iMac with an i7 in it. I've upgraded the ram to 12 gigs and I'm running 10.8.2. I've been using it for VM testing (I'm going for a Microsoft Certification, irony) and I've been trying to work on running two VMs at once.

I've got Win Server 2008 R2 Running with 1 gig given, and Windows 7 running with 2 (more irony). Hypothetically, that should only use 3 gigs of the 12.

After checking activity monitor and reading it out. I'm curious how I can free some of this so I'm not having my VM's lag more than Call of Duty on Dial Up.

Any insight would be awesome!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

Using Activity Monitor to show you CPU and RAM usage​

* Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor​

 

[hkbladelawkhk]

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

Using Activity Monitor to show you CPU and RAM usage​

* Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor​

hehe, oops, I noticed that the photo was hotlink protected, now shows the screenshot.

Page in 23.96 gb
Page out 40.9 mb

 

[MacFoodPoisoner]

OS X is **** at managing memory and it hasn't been fixed. Sorry that's not actually helpful, but that's my experience after reading countless threads on apple support forums and owning quite a few macs.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

hehe, oops, I noticed that the photo was hotlink protected, now shows the screenshot.

Page in 23.96 gb
Page out 40.9 mb

You have no RAM problem, take a look at the second link in my first post to understand Activity Monitor and reading memory activity.

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

It is probably just feeling sluggish due to the HDD.
You can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD / SSD, to see, if it is the culprit:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench