Just added more RAM - and performance suffers?

[Hawt]

I have a black 2.2ghz black macbook.

I had 1gb of RAM and just bought 4gb of RAM from OtherWorldComputing and put it in today. After putting it in I bought and ran memtestosx. It did three tests and came up with no problems.

I turned on my computer and upgraded to Leopard 10.5.2 and then did the graphics update as well.

When I looked at istat pro I noticed that my wired memory went up to 550-600mb when it used to be in the 250-300mb range. Does adding more RAM increase the amount that becomes wired for the OS? Or did the Leopard update really just double what used to be required for my memory. Or is this an issue with my new RAM?

I used to have 1gb and having open firefox, adium and thunderbird I would still have about 150-200mb of free ram, now with the same setup on 4gb I have 2.9gb free, so I used to be using about 800mb of RAM and now I'm using over a gig? Also I noticed that start up seems to take longer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[abijnk]

First, since you have more physical RAM your OS can be more liberal with it, which explains why you are seeing the jump in amount used at one time.

As for comparing your usage values, it is also problematic that you have changed your system settings since then by upgrading to 10.5.2; this also accounts for startup time. To be able to accurately compare those things every setting, software version, etc needs to be exactly the same.

Hope that helps a little.

 

[trainguy77]

The system will use more RAM now that its available. Now it will leave more in RAM as its not worried about running out. As for startup times alot of people are reporting that with 10.5.2

 

[Hawt]

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my thread. After I installed 10.5.2 I realized I probably should have checked the specs on the RAM first, I remember glancing at them before I rebooted into memtest but I don't remember what they were. An external HDD is my next purchase so I can start using time machine.

I'm glad to know that this is all normal!

Thanks again,
-Tim