Macbook 6.1 (late 2009) with 8GB RAM

M

MacOSXuser

macrumors regular
How does it perform compare to 4GB? I have 4GB in the macbook right now but I am always getting less than 200mb free memory, and sometimes a pop-up will show i am low on memory. I looked at benchmark of 8gb the increased performance is not as great as jumping from 2GB to 4GB. Is it still worth upgrading?
 
MacOSXuser said:
How does it perform compare to 4GB? I have 4GB in the macbook right now but I am always getting less than 200mb free memory, and sometimes a pop-up will show i am low on memory. I looked at benchmark of 8gb the increased performance is not as great as jumping from 2GB to 4GB. Is it still worth upgrading?
Click to expand...
First, there's more to memory than just free memory.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Use Activity Monitor to see what your Page Outs are. Second, the pop-up you're most likely seeing relates to how much hard drive space you have available, not how much RAM you have available. How much free space do you have on your hard drive?
 
MacOSXuser said:
How does it perform compare to 4GB? I have 4GB in the macbook right now but I am always getting less than 200mb free memory, and sometimes a pop-up will show i am low on memory. I looked at benchmark of 8gb the increased performance is not as great as jumping from 2GB to 4GB. Is it still worth upgrading?
Click to expand...


Which pop up shows you that you tun out of memory?
Mac OS X doesn't do that, only if you run out of storage capacity, which is not the same as RAM.

What is Computer Memory? RAM vs Hard Drive
RAM vs. HDD (Hard Disk Drive)


How much free HDD capacity have you left?

And is that the message you get?
picture1rh3.jpg
 
I have 20gbs left on my hard drive (SSD). If you haven't seen a low memory massage before and Mac OS asking you to force quit a program then please look on google images.
 
MacOSXuser said:
I have 20gbs left on my hard drive (SSD). If you haven't seen a low memory massage before and Mac OS asking you to force quit a program then please look on google images.
Click to expand...

With what search terms?

Normally Mac OS X swaps the data from the RAM to the HDD.
Have you taken a look at Activity Monitor > System Memory and seen what your "Free", "Wired", "Active", "Inactive" and "Used" items say?

What application do you use that eats so much RAM anyway?

And yes, going fro 2GB to 4GB is always a boost, though an SSD surely makes swapping easier and faster.
 
MacOSXuser said:
Wired 400mb
Active 2.2GB
Inactive 2.3GB
Free 30mb

How do you free inactive ram??
Click to expand...

Not really a need to:

Inactive memory

This information in memory is not actively being used, but was recently used.

For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit it, the RAM that Mail was using is marked as Inactive memory. This Inactive memory is available for use by another application, just like Free memory. However, if you open Mail before its Inactive memory is used by a different application, Mail will open quicker because its Inactive memory is converted to Active memory, instead of loading Mail from the slower hard disk.
Click to expand...

from a link in the following (previous) post:

GGJstudios said:
...
Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor...
Click to expand...

And if you still like to free inactive memory: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1078329/, post #23 and following
 
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GGJstudios said:
You don't. And you don't need to. Mac OS X knows how to manage RAM. Read the link I posted to learn what inactive RAM is.
Click to expand...

I have so much inactive ram and my mac is slowing down because I am not getting enough free ram. It is not swapping inactive ram for other application to use. If you haven't seen a low memory pop-up and finder asking you quit an application, it means you are not experienced enough so quit asking people to learn from your limited knowledge. Thanks.
 
MacOSXuser said:
I have so much inactive ram and my mac is slowing down because I am not getting enough free ram. It is not swapping inactive ram for other application to use. If you haven't seen a low memory pop-up and finder asking you quit an application, it means you are not experienced enough so quit asking people to learn from your limited knowledge. Thanks.
Click to expand...

Yeah.

Again: What application do you use that is so power hungry? Even when I opened 46 applications at once or 20 12MP RAW photos in PS I never got such warning, only with PS I got the "Startup Disk is almost full" message.

Anyway, maybe your system is corrupt, as it will not properly purge inactive RAM.

Maybe this time.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Yeah.

Again: What application do you use that is so power hungry? Even when I opened 46 applications at once or 20 12MP RAW photos in PS I never got such warning, only with PS I got the "Startup Disk is almost full" message.

Anyway, maybe your system is corrupt, as it will not properly purge inactive RAM.

Maybe this time.
Click to expand...

I have most of my apps in my dock running at the same time, the developer apps are pretty power hungry. I also use PS and AI at the same time with my external monitor.
 
MacOSXuser said:
I have so much inactive ram and my mac is slowing down because I am not getting enough free ram. It is not swapping inactive ram for other application to use
Click to expand...
You have no facts to show what Mac OS X is doing with the inactive RAM. You can only read the amount of inactive RAM at any given time, but not how Mac OS X is allocating it. You're making assumptions with no facts to back them up.

You're also making assumptions about my knowledge and experience. You assume I haven't seen a warning that available memory is low. I didn't say I haven't seen one. I said it was likely that the warning you saw related to hard drive space, since that is a more commonly seen message. Many Mac users misquote or misread messages. Since you didn't quote the message verbatim or provide a screen capture, it is reasonable to suggest a more commonly-seen message. That doesn't imply that I'm not familiar with other messages.
 
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Compared to Leopard, SL seems a bit..... anal retentive about keeping inactive memory around. Pre-SL, I had very few instances of swapping (pageouts). Post-SL, I now see it all the time. My iMac that's still on Leopard has 0 pageouts, even after an uptime of months.

Something changed between Leopard and SL. What, I don't know. But I could certainly see Apple making most Macs more responsive by aggressively hanging onto inactive memory. That is, your first launch of an app after a reboot will take (for example), 5 "bounces" but any subsequent launch takes one or less - as long as it hasn't paged out the app yet.

The downside would be for the users with a lot of RAM-hungry apps running. I have seen my own system page out with plenty of inactive RAM available. While this shouldn't happen, it does.

In any case, RAM is dirt cheap right now. I'd say upgrade - 4Gb is only about $50 right now. It can't hurt and it may solve your issue.
 
Or if you are brave disable paging altogether and get 8gb ram. You can even save a few cycles on your ssd by doing that:p

I'm running without paging and no issues:D
 
Not to totally de-rail this thread, but as I also have an October 2009 Macbook (13") and it is still loaded with the default 2 GB. As Buy.Com is running this i was wondering if my system can handle it, because it seems like a great deal.
 
I've used lingon (the free one that should still be available on sourceforge, since the developer now charges money for it)
Go to system daemons then to com.apple.dynamic_pager and uncheck the enabled and save.

You can also remove the com.apple.dynamic_pager file or move it.

Just keep in mind that if os x runs out of memory it may result in havoc, probability crashing your system.

edit: you can download lingon here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lingon/files/Lingon/2.1.1/
 
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