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My Hungry, Hungry Hippo

M

Michael73

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 27, 2007
1,082
41
My new Octo has 4GB of Apple shipped RAM and I've been dying to finally try Aperture so last night I took the plunge and downloaded the 30-day trial.

I couldn't believe it! I'm looking at my activity monitor and Aperture eats up 1.5GB and 2.0GB. Safari is using 1GB and Mail is using 800MB. I mean with 4 GB I'm seeing only 500MB of free RAM. I'm not even using Handbrake to do any encoding in the background or any other multi-tasking. That's nuts!!!!

So here's the question. I have a pair of 1GB OWC RAM sticks from my old MP (667Mhz stuff) that I can send back to OWC for $55 credit and I have about a $200 budget right now. Would you:
A) Get 4 x 1GB, or
B) Get 2 x 2GB
The trade off is that the 4, 1GB sticks would be the best performance-wise but would fill all 8 slots when combined with my existing 4, 1GB modules. The 2, 2GB gives me 2 slots for expansion later.
 
I'd go for the 2x2 GB, personally. I'd rather have my slots open for future expansion than save a little now and have to pay more later.
 
Mackilroy said:
I'd go for the 2x2 GB, personally. I'd rather have my slots open for future expansion than save a little now and have to pay more later.
Click to expand...

ditto, that's basically what i did.

i think this business about reduced performance not having all matched sticks is pretty overblown. having plenty of memory overhead would be more important, imo.
 
There's gotta be something wrong IMO. I just tried Safari beta on Vista side by side with IE7 and I loaded the same four pages (apple, cnn, microsoft, amd) and ram usage was 69MB for Safari and 65MB for IE. I cant imagine any possible way for a browser to take 1GB - or an email software to take 800MB. I run outlook 2003 here and RAM usage rarely ever goes about 80MB.

I'd agree with others and say get 4GB right now since prices are good, but IMO you need to see why so much of your RAM is used. It cant be normal.
 
Hasn't the Mac always been a memory hog? I mean and app may reserve 2 Gigs in memory, but that doesn't mean that those 2 Gigs are actually "active". "Free" memory is just the memory that no application has dibbs on. If you throw your mamchine 8 gigs on memory, applications are going to snatch it up, but that doens't mean that you're out of memory.

Am I right?
 
krye said:
Hasn't the Mac always been a memory hog? I mean and app may reserve 2 Gigs in memory, but that doesn't mean that those 2 Gigs are actually "active". "Free" memory is just the memory that no application has dibbs on. If you throw your mamchine 8 gigs on memory, applications are going to snatch it up, but that doens't mean that you're out of memory.

Am I right?
Click to expand...

Yeah, it isn't really a memory hog but there is no reason to have free ram when it can be put to good use.

What's the point in having it then ;)
 
Don't misstake virtual memory for real memory...

Most of the virtual memory that activity monitor displays is... as the name implies... just virtual : it is not allocated to physical ram (neither it is paged to disk)

Example : safari now uses 87Mb real memory, which is the real memory footprint of the application, but virtual memory appears over 1Gb...

Another one : total virtual memory used is now over 50Gb on my mac pro, whereas I do have still over 8Gb of available ram (out of my 10Gb of ram...)

So maybe there is not that much reason to panic... One good indicator that you are running out of memory is the page outputs number, in the memory tab of activity monitor. This one grows when page are swapped to disk...

phjo
 
The Mac OS will cache a lot of application data in to RAM. It will release this cache when another application needs the space. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Aperture, however, does require a lot of RAM. Its a big app to begin with, and will keep a lot of image thumbnails in RAM for fast access. Apple's specs state Aperture requires 1GB of RAM, and, apparently, 2GB of RAM on the Mac Pro.
 
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