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Time for more ram?

R

RyanE

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 4, 2008
4
0
I'm using a year old iMac (specs below) that is getting more and more beachball occurrences. I've tried cleaning up files and repairing permissions via Onyx, but I've begun to think I need more ram for some reason.

I opened Activity Monitor and here's what I saw

Free: 735mb
Wired: 436mb
Active: 3.89gb
Inactive: 2.93gb
Used: 7.25gb

I work from home and have 10~ programs open at once on a daily basis, but the biggest culprit seems to be "Google Chrome Renderer." There are tons of those on there, all taking up anywhere from 40 to 100mb. Is this normal? I read that one of these show up per tab you have open and due to my work I tend to have a lot of tabs. Are my two main solutions to either open less tabs or get more ram? I don't mind the cost of upgrading, but I don't want to do it if it's pointless.

Much thanks in advance.

Processor: 2.8 GHz Inter Core i7
Memory: 8gb 1067 Mhz DDR3
 
RyanE said:
I'm using a year old iMac (specs below) that is getting more and more beachball occurrences. I've tried cleaning up files and repairing permissions via Onyx, but I've begun to think I need more ram for some reason.

I opened Activity Monitor and here's what I saw

Free: 735mb
Wired: 436mb
Active: 3.89gb
Inactive: 2.93gb
Used: 7.25gb

I work from home and have 10~ programs open at once on a daily basis, but the biggest culprit seems to be "Google Chrome Renderer." There are tons of those on there, all taking up anywhere from 40 to 100mb. Is this normal? I read that one of these show up per tab you have open and due to my work I tend to have a lot of tabs. Are my two main solutions to either open less tabs or get more ram? I don't mind the cost of upgrading, but I don't want to do it if it's pointless.

Much thanks in advance.

Processor: 2.8 GHz Inter Core i7
Memory: 8gb 1067 Mhz DDR3
Click to expand...

Since you have close to 4GB of free RAM, you certainly don't need any more.
 
@biggd - nope, 800gb of free space on the harddrive.

@bobr1952 - okay, I wasn't sure what to go with on the System Memory. The "free" said only 735mb but then I didn't know if the inactive 2.93gb mattered or not.
 
These days, I pretty much go with a general rule of thumb that if I can run "free" ram below 1GB in normal use, I pretty much need more ram. Having come up from nearly the beginning- when 64K was a LOT of ram and a 128K was "crazy", I am still surprised when I actually write that down. But that does seem to work pretty well.

If you don't mind the expense, RAM is really not that much of a cost. Load up, and don't look back. The only time you ever really have too much RAM is never, as sooner or later something you choose to run will tax the added RAM. That's always preferable to the much slower virtual RAM using hard drive buffers.
 
It doesn't look like RAM is your problem. But I always recommend maxing out the RAM when you can afford it.

You may want to do a fresh install of the OS after backing up with Time Machine.

Is there any particular application or task that keeps giving you beach balls?
 
run an ssd for your internal and put your large hd in an external enclosure.
 
Thanks for the replies, everyone.

@SandboxGeneral - It seems to happen most when I try to open an application (none in particular) or when I am navigating/changing a song in iTunes.

I've decided just to go ahead and bump up the RAM for the heck of it. I do a small bit of video editing on the side so at the very least I figure it can help there.
 
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