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jammypop

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 13, 2011
15
0
Hi

Well I took the plunge and now have my shiny 13.3" macbook pro base model which I am really loving!! Im thinking about upgrading my ram from 4 to 8 gb.

I have had a look at page ins / outs and outs must only be about 2% of ins. From basic usage what I have read would say any more ram wouldn't make any difference.

I play warcraft but only in a casual way. I don't do raids or battlegrounds and it runs fine for my needs.

Would it be worth upping my ram from 4 to 8 gb? Am i right in thinking that this increases that amount of ram available to the intel hd 3000. Also I'm planning on trying my hand at programming. Now i haven't done this since pascal and c. Pascal was in DOS and C in windows 3.1 and I can remember that compiling bigger programs sometimes used to take some time. Would it be worth it on this count too?

Many thanks in advance!
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,537
940
I have had a look at page ins / outs and outs must only be about 2% of ins. From basic usage what I have read would say any more ram wouldn't make any difference.
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.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

There is no meaningful correlation between page outs and page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs. Also, you can run for weeks or months, accumulating page ins, then go through a period of intense activity for only a few minutes which produces page outs. No ratio between the two is useful. The only thing that indicates a need for more RAM is the presence of significant page outs during normal workload, regardless of the page ins.
 

sweetbrat

macrumors 65816
Jun 17, 2009
1,443
1
Redford, MI
RAM isn't expensive, so yes, a lot of people will upgrade just for the sake of upgrading. They figure that you dropped a lot of cash on a computer, so you might as well drop a little more on a RAM upgrade since it's cheap. Personally, I don't see the point unless you actually need it. Why spend $30-40 if it's not actually going to help in any way? It's not a lot of money, but you can always wait and upgrade later if you find you need to.

I'd keep an eye on your Activity Monitor for a little while and use that to help you make your decision.
 

thundersteele

macrumors 68030
Oct 19, 2011
2,984
9
Switzerland
You basically answered the question yourself... you wouldn't see any significant benefits from upgrading to 8 GB.

programing: Some IDEs are quite heavy on RAM, but for the actual edit - compile - run cycle you don't need much RAM.

The integrated GPU would benefit from more RAM, as you already noted. It will get up to 512 MB. This might slightly improve gaming performance, but I don't think that the video RAM is a bottleneck with the slow integrated GPU.
 

theSeb

macrumors 604
Aug 10, 2010
7,466
1,893
none
programing: Some IDEs are quite heavy on RAM, but for the actual edit - compile - run cycle you don't need much RAM.
Pretty much all IDEs love RAM and it's very useful because your source files are small, therefore easily cacheable. This is why I strongly suggest RAM if you're a developer, but a SSD is not something that is mandatory, if you're on a budget.

It's difficult to not recommend upgrading to 8 GB when you look at the prices - it's a couple of vodka lemonades! If a user is considering 16 GBs, then I would start to question usage patterns and workflows.
 
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