[X-Unix] Memory G5 -?

[James Bucanek]

CP wrote on Thursday, December 23, 2004:
>I know having as much memory as possible is always best,

Techically, you should have all of the memory that you *need*.  ;)

> BUT… I 
>currently have 1.5 GB's and I'm wondering if more would help running 
>some of the following applications, or if the system will allocate as 
>needed.

<clip>

Who knows?  Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and GoLive *can* be memory hogs but it depends greatly on your work flow and project/document sizes.  Those three apps could easily suck up 5 or more Gigs of RAM in a heartbeat, but could also use as little as a few hundred Megs.

Open up the Activity Monitor, or get something cool like iPulse <http://www.iconfactory.com/ip_home.asp>, and watch your memory usage.  If your seeing swapping activity, large virtual memory store sizes, or your active memory is particularly high (more that 50%), then some more memory would probably help.  On the other hand, if your consistently have more than a quarter or more of your memory is free, then it's unlikely that getting more RAM will help.

Also factor into account that the kernal uses most of your unused memory as a disk cache.  A lot of speed can come from the fact that regularly accessed files are cached in RAM.  So it's not just your application memory that you have to total.

>G5 - 2.5GH'z
>10.3.6
>Oh, I'm asking because it does seems slow at times, but then again, it 
>seems much slower then I thought it was going to be???

I have a dual 2.5GHz G5 with 4.5GB of RAM, and it's quick as a bunny.

-- 
James Bucanek <mailto:privatereply at gloaming.com>