I bit the bullet and upgraded to 10.9. My motivation was the hope of better memory management and less spinning beach balls.
So far so good, my Windows 7 Bootcamp partition is still functional. I should of timed my old start up time to compare to my new start up time but I did not. The MacOS still takes quite a while to start up compared to Windows. As I said before, I have 3 external hard drives hooked to my 2011 MBP for a total of 8 partitions. I have no idea what impact this has on the OS. I'm going to use it for a couple of days before I report back on the Spinning Beach Ball (SBB) situation. Of note I did see a couple of beach balls on start up with the new OS...
It's looks like this model, 2011, 15", 2.2 Ghz intel Core i7 (model:MacBookPro8,2) can have memory added to it. I'll have to check it and see if there is access for RAM upgrades. If possible, but not 100% confirmed, I think this would correct the SBB issue. I'm not sure if this is a unibody model, but does that have an impact on RAM upgrades? Thanks!
Update: The answer is that "do it yourself" Ram upgrades are possible on this model. Looks like
this video and
this memory is what I want.
Question: After MacOS updates, are temp/installer file automatically flushed? If not, where can they be found?