Is it worth upgrading to 8Gb of RAM on a mid 2011 iMac 21"

[MartinAppleGuy]

I have found that I can upgrade from 4Gb of DDR3 RAM upto 8 for £38. Is this worth the money? I am running Moutain Lion on a 21" iMac mid 2011.

I do not plan on upgrading to Mavericks but will probably upgrade to the one after that. Is there any speed inprovent when running Mountain Lion with 8Gb over 4? What do you think?

 

[RedReplicant]

Do it.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

Do it.

Did you notice a difference when upgrading yours (or did it come with 8)?

I think the £38 is a lot better than the £80 Apple charge.

 

[pastrychef]

Launch Activity Monitor (found in Utilities folder) and take a look at your page outs. If you have many page outs, you will benefit from additional RAM.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

Launch Activity Monitor (found in Utilities folder) and take a look at your page outs. If you have many page outs, you will benefit from additional RAM.

I done this yesterday when running common things like iTunes and Safari and I had around 13mb free ram. Then it went up to 125mb. I will check page outs though.

Do you think that the new OSX or the one after it will work better with 8 Gb rather than 4Gb?

 

[pastrychef]

When looking at Activity Monitor, high page outs and large amount of swap memory is a definite sign that more RAM will help. In OS X, when you run out of physical RAM, it automatically uses virtual memory which is very bad for performance.

I can only guess what future versions of OS X will bring, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption that memory requirements will only increase.

 

[maflynn]

It all depends on your usage, if you're using apps that are demanding you'll notice a speed increase as the computer does not need to swap out to disk and then alter on read those swapped out pages.

Upgrading ram has always been the first upgrade to improve performance so its usually a safe bet.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

When looking at Activity Monitor, high page outs and large amount of swap memory is a definite sign that more RAM will help. In OS X, when you run out of physical RAM, it automatically uses virtual memory which is very bad for performance.

I can only guess what future versions of OS X will bring, but I think it's a fairly safe assumption that memory requirements will only increase.

I ordered it. Guessing it is an easy install (I have looked at the instructions).

 

[RedReplicant]

It's an easy install - 4GB is too little for daily usage to prevent swapping... 8GB is the sweet spot for the average user. Above that is heavy RAW file editing, video editing, and VMs. I do notice a difference between 8GB and 20GB but realistically I could get away with 12GB 95% of the time and 16GB 99.9% of the time.

 

[toddzrx]

FWIW, I upgraded from 4 to 8GB AFTER doing an SSD upgrade on my 2010 iMac. The boost in performance, while not dramatic, was noticeable. Easily the cheapest way to improve performance.