Optimizing RAM help

[whitetrashanth]

hi,

basically I have 3GB RAM in my quad Powermac G5

and I dont think its running to its full potential, at the moment it seems to be slowing down on just using firefox and aperture together
which
is utterly ridiculous


could anyone advise me on how i could obtain information on my memory usage and then tak the steps needed to change it for better memory consumption

thanks very much

 

[pprior]

System information will tell you how much ram you're using, though without looking I can tell you that 3GB will be slow with Aperture and about anything else running. Restart your system to clear the page-outs and then run aperture - if you see growing page-outs that means you're using virtual ram and hard disk access = slow.

I'm running 8GB of RAM and still get page outs when importing large amounts of files into aperture.

I saw a BIG performance boost going from 2GB to 4GB and a smaller but definitely noticeable one going from 4 to 8. i'm toying with going up to 10-12 but hate to put any more money into my mac pro right now.