Will 16GB of RAM really increase my speed?

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

Courcoul,

You do mean enough hard drive space for paging, don't you? I have plenty of room for that.

You're going to duplicate the amount of RAM in your system. The OS is going to want to reserve twice that amount on the hard drive for its operational purposes. Make sure you have at least 16GB free before doing the upgrade.

Really good reply for this topic, I was thinking the same question. I checked my swap and page out and there are pretty high numbers, so i'm upgrading to 16GB. Thanks a bunch for the great reply!

Hello- My Macbook pro (OS X 10.4.11) is getting really slow and I was wondering if it would help to get RAMs to speed up my comp too. I know very little about RAM and hardware.

I don't know if this would help but here's info about my mac and below is the activity monitor status :

Processor Speed:	2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors:	1
Total Number Of Cores:	2
L2 Cache (per processor):	2 MB
Memory:	1 GB

Wire: 174 mb

active: 370 mb

Inactive: 438 mb

used: 982

free: 41.45

vm size: 15.55 gb

page ins/outs: 323545/339639

(The green area in the pie chart is very slim compared to the rest.)

Any help would be much appreciated!!

Hi there, your post was really helpful to me, but I just wanted to make sure. I currently am using my mac on a normal basis and have 2.47GB page ins and 1.26GB page outs; does this mean that a RAM upgrade would be useful to me. From your answer I believe it would but I wanted to be sure. I also have 3.63GB of swap used.

Thanks,

Hugh

When Pageouts exceed 10% of Pageins ... you can benefit from more memory.

My system on 8 GB RAM did not post any Pageouts or swap usage until I had a marathon weekend of iMovie/iDVD editing.

aha yes then, thanks for such a quick response!

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

The only RAM intensive app I really run is Photoshop CS6, but I do keep a lot of apps open at one time (Acrobat Pro X, Outlook, InDesign CS6, Illustrator CS6, Word, Parallels running XP, iTunes at the moment) and I was wondering if the extra RAM would actually help me out.

I'm looking for some advice from people who have already upgraded to 16 GB... can you actually tell a difference?

OS X, Windows 7 and Linux, plus a myriad of apps including CS, running like a charm.

Yes, definitely a difference, especially since I upgraded from 4GB.

Not necessarily more speed as I stuck previously under the 4GB RAM limit with less open apps to avoid swapping to the drive, however more ability to run more at the same time thus improving my multi-tasking ability speed.

I have recently bought a Mac Mini with 4GB (I7). I was getting the spinning wheel when switching among the following running programs:

Firefox (around 6 sites)

IPhoto

ITunes

Safari (2 sites)

Activity Monitor

The memory pressure level usually reaching one third of the graph space and some compression showing.

I was skeptical at the beginning, since the announced new Mavericks memory handling improvements.

After installing 16GB, no spinning wheel anymore. Activity Monitor shows now almost 8GB of used memory. No memory compression and no swapping. It seems 4GB was really not enough.

Huge difference.