Upgrade RAM or SSD for Xcode?

[Ryan Burgess]

Hi Guys, I recently purchased a Late 2011 MacBook Pro with 2.3 gHz i5 and 4gb RAM. The computer is on Mavericks and running great.

But when I use Xcode I get the spinning wheel a lot. Especially when using the storyboard view, it bogs down for 30 seconds to a minute sometimes. This is really annoying obviously, and I was wondering if you guys could help me decide what would be a better upgrade to improve this.

For about the same price I can upgrade it to 16gb of RAM, or install a 256 SSD. Doing both is not an option right now, however I may later on. What do you guys think would help me most with this specific problem? Thanks!

 

[mfram]

My opinion is to upgrade to SSD.

 

[Weaselboy]

Start Activity Monitor and go to the memory tab then move the app over to the side and leave it open. Now do some Xcode work and see if you can replicate the beach ball. When that happens look at the memory pressure graph at the bottom. If that is still showing all green, you do not need more memory.

 

[Ryan Burgess]

Start Activity Monitor and go to the memory tab then move the app over to the side and leave it open. Now do some Xcode work and see if you can replicate the beach ball. When that happens look at the memory pressure graph at the bottom. If that is still showing all green, you do not need more memory.

I was able to successfully reproduce the beach ball (it happens every time without fail) but the memory pressure didn't change at all (see screenshot).

So apparently this means my RAM is fine, and I should upgrade to an SSD to fix this issue? Thanks

 

[brdeveloper]

RAM is nice, but if you're dealing with big projects and you're always saving/auto-saving/compiling stuff, a SSD is the #1 upgrade.

 

[Weaselboy]

I was able to successfully reproduce the beach ball (it happens every time without fail) but the memory pressure didn't change at all (see screenshot).

So apparently this means my RAM is fine, and I should upgrade to an SSD to fix this issue? Thanks

It is really hard to say. I am not familiar with Xcode storyboard mode, but from what I read after a Google search, it does not look like something that would be very disk intensive?

I mean an SSD will speed up any system regardless, but I'm just not sure maybe you don't have something else going on.

Does this happen any other time at all? A hard drive beginning to fail sometimes causes these issues. Do get anything when you use Disk Util to verify the disk?

 

[Ryan Burgess]

It is really hard to say. I am not familiar with Xcode storyboard mode, but from what I read after a Google search, it does not look like something that would be very disk intensive?

I mean an SSD will speed up any system regardless, but I'm just not sure maybe you don't have something else going on.

Does this happen any other time at all? A hard drive beginning to fail sometimes causes these issues. Do get anything when you use Disk Util to verify the disk?

I have not seen any slow down or beach ball in any other aspect of the computer except that particular part of Xcode...EXCEPT when I open disk utility. As it was opening it beach balled for about a minute then crashed and won't open again.

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[Weaselboy]

I have not seen any slow down or beach ball in any other aspect of the computer except that particular part of Xcode...EXCEPT when I open disk utility. As it was opening it beach balled for about a minute then crashed and won't open again.

Any help would be appreciated!

Ackk... That is not encouraging. I am wondering if you have a hard drive dying on you. Can you command-r boot to recovery and use Disk Util from there to verify the disk? Does that show any errors.

It is also possible a bad drive cable is causing this, but that is much less common than drive failure.