On Quantity of RAM & Heavy Multitasking
In my last post, I complained about the slow speed of applications running in Rosetta on an Intel Mac compared to their adjusted or universal versions. In particular my muttering was about Adobe’s Creative Suite—I compared CS2 applications to their CS3 versions and also brought up the connection between the different speed and presented more RAM as a possible solution to slow Rosetta applications.
Amöbe probably thought I’d refer to gigantic Photoshop documents or similar files that I work with. But it’s not about pictures the size of 2GB. It’s about the sum of all RAM installed on the whole computer.
The problem is: When working on my MacBook Pro, I need multiple apps to run simultaneously because I rather like to quickly switch between them. I don’t want to quit one application and open up another to look up some information—though I know that concentrating on one subject at a time leads to better productivity, concerning software I’m not a unitasker. I need several applications at once to solve one specific problem, so at least for me it’s not a solution to close the applications I don’t need at one moment in time because I’ll need them again in a second.
This quick switching between applications is what takes up time at the moment. If I did have more RAM, it simply would be quicker, the whole computer could be more responsive. The problem is that I now have only 2GB of space where the processor can store active data that’s needed to run my applications. Everything else gets written to the hard disk and as soon as it’s needed again, the processor needs to swap data from RAM and the hard disk first, before it can do anything with the new application.
You see: the more RAM available, the less needs to get outsourced to the hard disk, the quicker the computer responds, the faster I can work with various applications at the same time.
There are currently ~30 applications running on my system, nearly all of them are started at login—apps that I don’t need all the time (yeah, I’m looking in your direction Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign or even TextMate and Transmit) and for example dashboard widgets are not included yet.
These ~30 running applications are apps like Safari, Mail, NetNewsWire (my feedreader), Adium & Skype (for instant messaging), iGTD (a task management application), TimeLog (to keep track of the time I spend with certain projects), iCal (my calendar application of choice), iTunes, Quicksilver (for quick keyboard commands within the range of starting applications over e-mailing files to contacts from the address book to skipping tracks in iTunes, Quicksilver does everything with a few keystrokes) and for example extra system control panels like TextExpander that expands abbreviations for frequently-used texts. And many more.
All these applications eat up memory and I think I could work faster with them if I needn’t have to wait for the hard disk everytime I switch to another one. But unfortunately my MacBook Pro is too old to cope with more than the 2GB of RAM which are installed already.
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Hmm… let’s try to get my 2 gigs full…
Usually running Skype and Kopete for IM, Akregator (RSS), KMail, Amarok (Music), Terminal, Firefox. 724376 Bytes full. (HD Cache not even used, yeah all started at login)
Ok, heavy working conditions: opened Office program, GIMP (~Photoshop), Inkscape (~Illustrator), Blender (3D Animation), my webdevelopement kit, PDF-Viewer and still only 1069220 Bytes.
So now opening nearly every app ever used. Eclipse, Robocode, aMule, QT-Designer, some Exel-like stuff, MySQL-Client, started to render some 3D-movie. 1353012 Bytes. Still no HD-cache.
~19 apps + endless standard services etc.
Still no problem to switch between apps. Well, I could watch a video or burn dvds and rip some cds, copy files, use my apache+php extremely and so on, but I don’t think it’s realistic to use that much apps at once. Maybe sometimes when I have to burn something I will try that.
I think it’s not the amount of apps running. Even if they’re not running they remain cached in my RAM. I don’t know if I ever used HD cache. Maybe when creating some really big pictures…
PS: Shortcuts to control programs etc. are included as default…
hello …
i’ve a macbook pro and am using lightroom a lot these days …
more than phtoshop …
and am thinking of upgrading from 512mb to 2gb of RAM …
any thoughts on this …
will the cost justify the performance … ???
thanks …
@Am??be: I observed my stats for another day now: After booting up the machine and waiting for all the applications which are started with my login, I usuallly have around 300‚Äì350MB of my 2GB of RAM still free. Another amount of around 350‚Äì400MB is actually active, 1GB, that’s half of my RAM, is “inactive”. And there’s a swap file with a size of 64MB right after the start.
So there’s 1GB of data still on the RAM that doesn’t need to be there and some sort of buffer (the 300‚Äì350MB that are still kept free). I think this is exactly where things get interesting. Sure, you can say you don’t need more RAM since half of it isn’t active anyway. But‚Äîand this has nothing to do with the swap files‚ÄîI like the Mac OS X way of keeping data within reach. With more RAM installed, there’d simply be more “inactive” data around there, but this is exactly where things can speed up. This is the data you’d need to load from the hard disk‚Äîif it’s already stored in RAM you can directly access it. On a grand scale this is the concept for computers which use flash storage instead of hard disks‚Äîit’s faster.
@subcorpus: Since Lightroom is an application that manages a whole library of pictures, I’d absolutely recommend upgrading your RAM since Lightroom has to load tons of pictures and needs to work with them all the time, which needs pretty much RAM. 512MB is the minimum required for Mac OS X‚Äîso there’s only little space free for Lightroom to use and your MacBook Pro certainly has to use a lot of virtual storage.
We’d got a Powermac G5 at school that had great processors and everything, but still working on it was darn slow. After looking up the system’s features and found out only 512MB of RAM were installed‚Äîwe upgraded to 2GB and now the machine’s speedy as it should be. Go for it‚ÄîI expect a serious increase in speed (remember to use two identical chips‚Äîfor best performance, both cores of your processor should have access to the same amount of RAM).
Don’t know waht your mac caches in its RAM. of course Linux has some apps in its RAM too. but 1 GB of cached data ist ok and if you have 3 GB the cache will probably save some files you need but most of them aren’t needed. remember: You’ll have up to 10 GB of apps (an Macs don’t save HDD space, so maybe more) and even more other files, so you can’t cache all.
Don’t forget that you’ve opened all apps you need. So why cache other apps. And then, why cache files? in 2 gigs of free mem you can’t store 1% of your files.
So even if you have cached some files, you will need mostly others.
And it’s a fact that new HDDs fetch small files fast, because they have many heads and high rotation speed, so nearly no difference – and big files are to big to be cached.
So nearly no performance gain in this case.
When using just 512 MB of RAM an upgrade will speed up your machine anyway, because you won’t run any (challenging) app without having huge swap. YOu can consider buying another 512 MB of RAM, because in most cases 1 GB will speed up your machine suggested 300%, but an upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB won’t be that useful.
Hmm.. i tried to use my brothers 2 GB, because his computer is virus-infected and he’s on vacation, so he won’t need it. but his DDR-RAM isn’t compatible with my DDR2 ones. So if anyone could lend me 2 gig 800 MHz DDR2-RAM to test the performance?
While doing some research yesterday I found many people claiming your system works faster with every other GB.
In fact some guy wrote:
I personally also work on different machines at times (or even multiple‚Äîthough I certainly most of the time use my MacBook Pro) and can state from my personal experience, those with more RAM generally seem to work faster (as long as they’re equipped equally otherwise).
I’d still recommend upgrading to two 1 GB chips, which equals to 2 GB of RAM. Especially since HDDs of laptops are slower in general it’s better to have more RAM anyway. I can’t get enough and would like to upgrade my MacBook Pro further, but we know it doesn’t work.
And what about more than that? I couldn’t find anything…