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MBP Needs More Ram!

macuser1232

macuser1232

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 20, 2012
673
7
I am probably one of the BIGGEST multitasks here and I use a 13inch macbook pro i5 8gb of ram. Why doesn't mac allow their macbook pros to have up to 12 or 16 gb of ram! I mean really the HP Envy can! *Another reason why I love the Envy and why I regret getting my expensive mac. Do you think they will ever allow this? Soon 4gb is going to go extinct for the good laptops because people are needing more now days.
 
macuser1232 said:
I am probably one of the BIGGEST multitasks here and I use a 13inch macbook pro i5 8gb of ram. Why doesn't mac allow their macbook pros to have up to 12 or 16 gb of ram! I mean really the HP Envy can! *Another reason why I love the Envy and why I regret getting my expensive mac. Do you think they will ever allow this? Soon 4gb is going to go extinct for the good laptops because people are needing more now days.
Click to expand...
Are you certain that you need more RAM? Do you know how to check? Also, if you have the newest MBP, you can go to 16GB.

You can find specs on all Apple products, including maximum RAM:
 
macuser1232 said:
I am probably one of the BIGGEST multitasks here and I use a 13inch macbook pro i5 8gb of ram. Why doesn't mac allow their macbook pros to have up to 12 or 16 gb of ram! I mean really the HP Envy can! *Another reason why I love the Envy and why I regret getting my expensive mac. Do you think they will ever allow this? Soon 4gb is going to go extinct for the good laptops because people are needing more now days.
Click to expand...

All 2011 MBPs can accept 16 GB RAM, its chipset can eve support 32 GB RAM, but as no 16 GB modules exist, you are stuck with 16 GB nowadays.

If not, sell your Mac and get an Envy.
 
Both my Macbook pros have 16GB.

I paid $119 for the two 8GB sticks (for one machine).
Ram is cheap.
 
mac jones said:
Both my Macbook pros have 16GB.

I paid $119 for the two 8GB sticks (for one machine).
Ram is cheap.
Click to expand...

Dude are you serious!!!??? I have an early 2011 macbook pro model. I am sooo getting 16gb at least for my next macbook pro. I feel like I would be overdoing it if I got the 16 gb. Is that true? Should I feel that way? I mean I do have open my skype, email, google chrome with usually 8 or more windows open at once. Then sometimes I will have all that open as well as either photoshop, light room, final cut pro, OR(not and! haha) a game like minecraft or any other game.
 
macuser1232 said:
I feel like I would be overdoing it if I got the 16 gb. Is that true?
Click to expand...
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
 
GGJstudios said:
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Click to expand...
Yeah I usually check out activity monitor but I wasn't exactly sure what to look for specifically. I'll try this.

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GGJstudios said:
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Click to expand...
Well I just checked and I got 0 bytes for page outs after I restarted. One thing I make look at is when I am doing a good amount of things on my computer like I mentioned early I will check the light green part of the graph it shows you in activity monitor and if not a lot of the green is showing then I know that my mac could use a little bit more ram.
 
macuser1232 said:
Well I just checked and I got 0 bytes for page outs after I restarted.
Click to expand...
That's because restarting resets that value to zero. That's the purpose of restarting.
macuser1232 said:
One thing I make look at is when I am doing a good amount of things on my computer like I mentioned early I will check the light green part of the graph it shows you in activity monitor and if not a lot of the green is showing then I know that my mac could use a little bit more ram.
Click to expand...
You don't have to check the graph or the colors. The only thing you need to watch for is page outs.
 
macuser1232 said:
I will check the light green part of the graph it shows you in activity monitor and if not a lot of the green is showing then I know that my mac could use a little bit more ram.
Click to expand...

Error!


Anything in BLUE ("inactive") on that chart is also "free" ram. It is currently used as cache, but will be reclaimed for use as memory for applications as required.

If you're just looking at the graph and going "omg i have no green left!!" you are mis-reading it :)
 
GGJstudios said:
That's because restarting resets that value to zero. That's the purpose of restarting.

You don't have to check the graph or the colors. The only thing you need to watch for is page outs.
Click to expand...

Oh ok. ya i checked it right before i restarted and i still had 0 bytes though.

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throAU said:
Error!


Anything in BLUE ("inactive") on that chart is also "free" ram. It is currently used as cache, but will be reclaimed for use as memory for applications as required.

If you're just looking at the graph and going "omg i have no green left!!" you are mis-reading it :)
Click to expand...

so how would i read it then?
 
If you had 0 bytes page outs before the reset, then you have no need for more RAM. As GG said, reset and use as you normally do for a normal workday period (whatever that may be for you, 6, 8, 10, 12 hours) and look at the page outs at the end of the days usage. If as mentioned they are high you are a good candidate for more RAM, if they are low then you are fine.
 
I just decided to upgrade to 16 gb ram because the price is cheap and I run, at a minimum, 3x VMs on top of a full os x application stack. I sometimes run 4 full the full experience (2x Win 7, 1x Mac OS 10.7 client (using fusion hack), 1x Win Server)
 
Eddyisgreat said:
I just decided to upgrade to 16 gb ram because the price is cheap and I run, at a minimum, 3x VMs on top of a full os x application stack. I sometimes run 4 full the full experience (2x Win 7, 1x Mac OS 10.7 client (using fusion hack), 1x Win Server)
Click to expand...
Yeah I guess a good reason to upgrade to 16gb of ram is if you are running windows on your mac like using virtual machine or parallels.
 
As of right now, the Apple 8 GB RAM upgrade costs about the same as a Crucial 16 GB RAM kit. So if Apple offered the 16 GB RAM option, imagine how much it would be...

And honestly, it seems that many users are okay with 4 GB for what they do. For light to medium use, 4 GB will probably get the job done. For a long time, I didn't even utilize 4 GB (although now I max my 16 on a regular basis since I am using some softwares that are memory hogs).
 
macuser1232 said:
so how would i read it then?
Click to expand...

as previously sated, monitor the page-outs.


or, if you insist on using the graph, your "available" ram is the blue+green sections.

the blue ram is available, it is just used for cache until needed. the green ram is totally unused. as in, if you constantly have green on the graph, you actually have more ram than you need....


now, unless you turn disk caching off (i think it might be called buffered IO) in VMware Fusion, Fusion will use ALL your ram as disk cache for your VMDK file(s) - as it reads from the file(s) it will keep the data in "inactive" memory as cache. Obviously, VMDK files are massive (i.e., probably bigger than your RAM) so don't be alarmed if you run vmware and have no "green" on the graph at all.
 
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