well was looking to upgrade my ram. have 4gb 2x2. was going to get another 2x4gb thatll give me 12gb. of course another $40 i can just max it out at 16gb of ram. 12,14gb how and when will it be noticeable, or is it just a waste of money? not a professional. amateur photographer and video. aperture, final cut maybe. whole lot of simultaneous running programs. would like to do more phot/video editing. i ws being held back by my pc. what do u think?
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when is enough, enough
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If you have an excessive amount of Page outs, then it's certainly time to add more RAM. Open up Activity Monitor and click on System Memory. Take a screen shot and post it and you'll want to do this after you've been using the computer for a while after turning it on or restarting it.
I checked the activity monitor and without runing a ton, iTunes, iMovie , web it was paging out. Good to see its necessity.
But not for too long. If you haven't restarted for a month, then the page outs will be misleading.
Restarting and using it for a day and then checking out the page outs is ideal, in my opinion.
40$ to max out? Do that so then you won't have to worry about it and can focus on photo and video editing.
Eh... this is a known issue with a number of operating systems. They start keeping lots of extra data loaded into the ram, even from programs you havent used in a while, just because its there. Page writes will happen even with spare ram. You'll still see them to a certain degree if you upgrade, you just dont want to see a LOT of them.
Feel free to upgrade, but don't be shocked when you really dont notice any difference for day-to-day use.
Feel free to upgrade, but don't be shocked when you really dont notice any difference for day-to-day use.
But not for too long. If you haven't restarted for a month, then the page outs will be misleading.
I would agree. My screenshot was after 3 days of up time.
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.
Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor