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MBP 13 inch Mid 2009 RAM Upgrade

H

h0ttballer

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 15, 2010
40
0
Okay so i currently have the 13 inch mid 2009 model with 2GB of RAM.
I bought it in fall of 2009, so Ive had this for a bit. As time went by, I noticed that my overall performance has gotten slower. It takes longer to open applications and I see the spinning circle every so often. I want to upgrade to 4 GB of RAM. Is 4GB noticeably better? BTW, I am a very light user. Most of my RAM goes to Safari and iTunes. Thanks guys.
 
Use you Mac as you normally would and then post a screen shot of your Activity Monitor 'System Memory' tab. From this we should be ale to gauge if 4GB is going to be beneficial.
 
For 2 to 4, yes. Above 4, probably not for what you do. A lot of ppl here go from 4 to 8 so you should be able to find 4 gb's for cheap (like 50 or less)
 
okay, so this is what I have.

screenshot20101222at121.png
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Oh wow. Little free, low inactive, high swap.

Yeah, you will see some improvement. You want lots of breathing room as demonstrated below (note, I haven't yet fired up my daily assortment of Virtual Machines and such).
10wiixf.png
 
From MacPerformanceGuide:

Free
The memory is completely unused.
Wired
The memory is locked down and cannot be shared, or swapped to disk (system software and drivers require Wired memory).
Active
The memory is actively being used by programs and/or the system software.
Inactive
Typically means that the memory has been used to cache disk I/O. This is not a waste, it can greatly speed up some programs, like Photoshop.
Used
Ignore this; it’s a summary statistic.
Virtual memory size, Page ins, Page outs, Swap used
The Page ins and Page outs are useful: ideally these numbers stay a zero (but it’s normal for a small amount of paging to occur). If you see the numbers increasing steadily, install more memory; the system is being forced to swap data from real memory onto disk to share the real memory among programs. Check them before and after a time-consuming task: if they’ve changed more than a few percent, then you almost certainly will benefit from installing more memory. Ignore VM size.
Starting programs, running commands, etc will increase the memory requirements. The Real Memory column is the one that matters—that’s the actual space the program is using in the memory chips.
Click to expand...

And I don't have a ton 'free' just because lol. I have plenty of ram that goes beyond the OSes needs and I havn't yet done anything to utilize the available mem...yet.
 
Eddyisgreat said:
From MacPerformanceGuide:



And I don't have a ton 'free' just because lol. I have plenty of ram that goes beyond the OSes needs and I havn't yet done anything to utilize the available mem...yet.
Click to expand...

To my knowledge, page in amts don't matter as it is simply the amt that is written to the ram. Page outs do matter as that is when the hdd is accessed as there is not enough ram. Having a high page out # relative to page in means your computer has to frequently use the hdd which will cause slow responsiveness

The rule of thumb is to think about upping your ram when page outs become more than 10% of your page in amt
 
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