My point is, Apple does NOT say "1 GB minimum." They say "1 GB." There are lots of people who run SL just fine with 1 GB, myself included. I'm not disagreeing that more RAM is better, but this thread was started by someone with a fairly complicated performance issue. Telling him/her to add RAM completely ignores the fact that the machine has a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo. That should be able to run SL fine, including Safari, GarageBand other memory hogs.
To add RAM, with so little investigation, is like taking your car to a mechanic because the car makes a funny noise and the advice, without even looking at the car, is to say replace the engine.
(BTW, VM and RAM drives are the exact opposite of each other. VM puts RAM on a hard disk. RAM drives put a hard disk in RAM. So I'm not completely clear on your last point.)
mt
You're absolutely correct on the last point, my typing:thought coherence ratio was a bit out of kilter there.
That still does not override the fact that the OP is essentially near out of real effective RAM as running; as they start apps and all the attendant processes, more RAM will be required and they are pretty much out of it. Your car analogy is not appropriate nor accurate. More to the point is one that would state that he isn't getting as far on a current tankful of gas, so adding a larger tank would extend the range more effectively than running on fewer cylinders to extend the mileage. Or, he isn't going fast enough, so instead of increasing horsepower, just pull out all those unused seats and deal with the lessened capacity.
Again, to Apple's
marketing statement that 1GB is a "General Requirement" is just that, not to be taken as an absolute statement of total needs, and once more,
only for running the OS and supporting processes. To state or believe otherwise is, at the least, naive.
Could one run the OS and all sorts of goodies on a base 1GB? Sure, but it would be painful, and to suggest that improving the performance without addressing the memory shortage first—and it is a shortage in this case—is misleading.
From the first screen shot, the available RAM was under 3% of total (or over 97% utilized if you prefer), and Page Outs were 47% of Page Ins. These, coupled with the amount of swap used, are absolute indicators of insufficient physical RAM, assuming of course that one desires something other than abysmal performance. The amount of time running or number of apps open are not important, as the numbers shown are proportionally wretched however you look at them.
Now, do they need to max out the RAM based on the system capacity? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the fundamental point remains that the amount of physical RAM currently in that box is clearly insufficient for the demands placed on it.
