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What a difference the 8 gig ram makes

L

lukester

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 2, 2009
455
6
RI
I was always having problems with my Mac bogging down.. red spinning ball, wanting for things to happen,, now with the 8 gig things are happening very quick. I did not realize ram was so cheap. Best $45 I have spent

Now I may go for that 750 gig 7200rpm Hybrid seagate drive. smoking then
 
8 gb on my 2010 MBP definitely improved its performance. The SSD didn't hurt either ;)
 
Hi All,

I recently got the current 17" UMBP with the standard 4GB Ram. It is surprising how much RAM gets used up even with only a single app running - I noticed last night while just on Safari that only 1.34GB was left! I think I might also upgrade to 8GB!

Bazzy!
 
Free ram is wasted ram. Unlike windows, OSX does a great job at managing ram.

Instead of looking at free ram, look at page ins. That is ram pages swapped out to disk being read back in. That means there's not enough available ram to store those pages and OSX has to store them on the relatively slow disk.

High page-ins and/or If page-outs exceed page-ins, you definitely don't have enough RAM.

Here's a link that explains it better then my feeble attempts http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
 
maflynn said:
Free ram is wasted ram. Unlike windows, OSX does a great job at managing ram.

Instead of looking at free ram, look at page ins. That is ram pages swapped out to disk being read back in. That means there's not enough available ram to store those pages and OSX has to store them on the relatively slow disk.

High page-ins and/or If page-outs exceed page-ins, you definitely don't have enough RAM.

Here's a link that explains it better then my feeble attempts http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Click to expand...
Actually page ins are fine because they also happen during the initial startup of a program. It's mostly page outs and more importantly page outs per second that matter. On my iMac with 8GB or ram, I have 2.25 GB of page ins and only 2.1MB of page outs over a period of 3 days.

Swap space used is a secondary measure, with 4GB of ram, I had usually 1 to 2 GB or swap in use and constant paging. So for my system and current use 8GB is fine.
 
maflynn said:
Free ram is wasted ram. Unlike windows, OSX does a great job at managing ram.
Click to expand...
What a nonsense. Windows has a much more sophisticated approach to RAM management. OSX is definitely poorer. OSX is only slightly ahead of Windows XP quality RAM management.

On my iMac with 8GB or ram, I have 2.25 GB of page ins and only 2.1MB of page outs over a period of 3 days.
Click to expand...
I doubt those numbers. With only 2.25GB page ins you'd use about a fourth of your RAM. In three days no way. What would be the point of 8GB RAM with those page ins.

@op
open terminal and type
vm_stat
uptime
post the result
or at least the swap, uptime, page outs and page ins for comparison.

I got 215GB page ins. 10GB page outs and 6GB swap but that is mostly unused cache, it is hardly ever swapped back. That is 15 days uptime but still 2.25GB wouldn't be enough for 3 days even with very little usage that seems odd.
 
macbook pro i5 said:
Oh **** yeah if only I could afford it:(
Click to expand...

SSDs are getting pretty cheap now. I say a sale going for the Samsung 830 256gb for $250. Its DEFINITELY worth the money, IEO (In Everyones Opinion:))
Ram wont do anything for you unless you use it, but it is a very cheap upgrade. I couldnt imagine going back to a HDD after getting the Crucial M4.
 
I saw a significant difference when i updated my early 2011 MBP to 8GB of RAM.

4GB and Lion was a pretty bad experience for me, constant page outs and beach balls. I wasn't doing any thing demanding, just had Xcode, mail, 5-6 chrome tabs open and some basic photoshop.

Even with 8GB i sometimes encounter large page outs.
 
shanimal said:
SSDs are getting pretty cheap now. I say a sale going for the Samsung 830 256gb for $250. Its DEFINITELY worth the money, IEO (In Everyones Opinion:))
Ram wont do anything for you unless you use it, but it is a very cheap upgrade. I couldnt imagine going back to a HDD after getting the Crucial M4.
Click to expand...

Ahh but you see I am a student and I am building a gaming rig at the end of the year which is why I basically can't afford anything!
 
The 750GB hybrid drive should be a good upgrade.

It'll give some of the benefits of an SSD: good boot performance, and pretty good random access performance, without having to pay a ton for the capacity (not to mention there really isn't a 750GB SSD in 2.5" form).
 
I have a 2011 MBA13 i5 runnig Lion with only 4GB RAM and I don't have any beach ball issue mentioned above. I run W7 Ultimate via Parallels 50% Of time. 8GB will be great but 4GB works fine for me.

What do y
 
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