Noticeable improvement in Lion going from 4GB RAM to 8GB

[St. Germain]

Lion seems to be a memory hog (at this point) from what I've seen. During the course of my workday I was regularly finding myself using over the 4GB of RAM my 2010 MBP came with. I was getting several Page Outs in Activity Monitor. I decided to upgrade to 8GB of RAM and everything is running much more soothly than before. It almost seems like a new machine.

I'm guessing that further point releases might change Lion's appetite for RAM.

 

[guitarman777]

Lion seems to be a memory hog (at this point) from what I've seen. During the course of my workday I was regularly finding myself using over the 4GB of RAM my 2010 MBP came with. I was getting several Page Outs in Activity Monitor. I decided to upgrade to 8GB of RAM and everything is running much more soothly than before. It almost seems like a new machine.

I'm guessing that further point releases might change Lion's appetite for RAM.

What concerns me is the fact that it *still* uses a metric ton of RAM. I've got 8GB in my MBP too, and if Safari is left open long enough, WebProcess will end up using nearly 75% of my RAM. I really don't understand why that's necessary, and I hope it's tweaked in a future update. Was hoping for a fix for it in 10.7.1. Definitely better to have the 8GB of RAM available.

 

[St. Germain]

What concerns me is the fact that it *still* uses a metric ton of RAM. I've got 8GB in my MBP too, and if Safari is left open long enough, WebProcess will end up using nearly 75% of my RAM. I really don't understand why that's necessary, and I hope it's tweaked in a future update. Was hoping for a fix for it in 10.7.1. Definitely better to have the 8GB of RAM available.

Available RAM isn't always a good way to measure it due to the way OS X likes to use as much of your RAM as it "needs." It'll adjust itself as new things are opened, etc. I generally only worry if I start to see Page Outs. Otherwise I just figure that OS X is managing the available RAM efficiently. If you see Page Outs though in Activity Monitor, that's where you start running into problems.