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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc.
AAPL 259.48+0.5%Jan 30 9:30 AM EST
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To: pyslent who wrote (70635)10/31/2007 5:12:35 PM
From: aaplfan   of 213183
 
I would guess that unless you have an unusually light workload, 9 times out of 10 more memory would be a much better investment. You can look in Activity Monitor to get a sense for how much memory your system is using. There's a nice utility called MenuMeters that I actually find more useful as it will do things like give you a quick status of how much VM is actually being used as well as a visual indication of hard drive activity (usually, the more VM being actively used = poorer performance) etc.

One simple test you can do on your own: after you've been using your computer for a while (i.e. you've loaded whatever apps/documents/web pages you normally would) simply try command-tabbing between several applications. If you hear a lot of disk activity just to activate another, already loaded, application... that's virtual memory and it's over an order of magnitude slower than physical memory. I've got 2GB of RAM in my current iMac and I can 'feel' it start to hit virtual memory and can tolerate it up until the point where I'm 'living in' virtual memory (i.e. the system is actively using 2+ GB of virtual memory.) In an optimally performing system, some virtual memory may be used as the system is smart enough to shove loaded data/code that isn't being used off into VM to free the RAM for something that actually needs it. The problem is when you really don't have as much RAM as you need and the system is having to constantly swap things in and out of memory to get the job done.
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