Should I upgrade to 8 GBs of RAM?

Hello Everyone,

One of the most difficult parts of coming from a "Wintel" background, is the lack of technology resources for the Mac. Macs "just work," so there is not as much of a need for techies or "geeks" as in the Windows and Linux world. So whenever I have a technical question about my Mac, it is often difficult to find a "good" answer, as many Mac users just don't know. So, I thought I would post my question here, as I have had zero luck on the official Apple forum. So, here is my techy question with details

I have the 13.3" MBP that is in my signature, that comes stock with 4 GBs of RAM. When I first got it (this past March), it was running Snow Leopard and I was running it in "Mac only mode," meaning I was not using BootCamp nor any other virtulizing software, just native Mac apps. The primary purpose of my Mac, is for my graduate program. I had originally intended to just use XCode and Mac native apps for my coursework, but found myself needing MS Visual Studio. So, I bit the bullet and purchased Parallels Desktop for Mac (version 7), and installed a smallish Windows 7 VM. The Windows 7 VM is suprisingly nimble on the Mac, and Visual Studio works fine, most of the time. However, since upgrading to Lion, a couple of things have happend. First off, my boot time has doubled, and while running the VM I get frequent spinning beach balls. If the VM (or the Mac for that matter) were doing something intensive while this happend, I would expect the slow down, but this occurs ALL THE TIME, even when both the VM and Mac are just idle.

With my Windows computers (I own a few), I have not yet found a use for more than 4 GBs of RAM, even when doing "heavy" tasks, so I assumed that 4 GBs would be sufficiant for the Mac. So before I spend any money, do you think upgradign to 8 GBs will help with my system slugishness? It is fine when the VM is not running, but if I open the VM (with just the desktop up) and PowerPoint (Mac vesion) and a couple of webpages in Safari, it is very sluggish right now. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Rich S.

 

In regards to the last line of your message, where you state when VM is open with powerpoint and a few safari tabs, how much ram are you using at that point out of the 4gb? 8gb may help a little, but I'm more inclined to say that an ssd would benefit you more in terms of boot times, application loading times, and file access.

 

Hy khetik,

System profiler shows anywhere between 30 and 80 MBs "free" RAM with all my apps open. The funny thing, is it wasn't sluggish with this same load under Snow Leopard, just with Lion. SSDs are too expensive, and require too much maintenance. From what I understand, unless you get an SSD from Apple, OS X will not naitevly implement TRIM, which would eventually result in slowere performance. Thanks!

Rich S.

 

Sincerely, get the 8gb, its a breeze when Im running vms, and a SSD when you have the money, disk access is a huge bottleneck in vms

 

SSDs are actually getting cheaper really fast. Next year you might already get a 256gb-drive for below 200 dollars.

 

30-80mb free ram?? Yes up it to 8gb.

 

amazon = upgrade for $30.00 best $30 one can spend!

 

@OP: BTw did you upgrade to Lion or did a clean install? There could ne some left over stuff from SL that is not accessible in Lion so you experience sluggishness..just a thought (I am not a Mac user but just a curious onlooker)

 

The OS X installer does a very good job of packing away old files on in-place upgrades. That's not an issue for Macs as it can potentially be for Windows.

Since the OP is using virtual machines, more RAM is definitely handy. An SSD would go even further toward improving performance in that environment.