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July 25, 2006

hardware

Is 512MB enough?

Posted Jul. 25, ’06, 9:02 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Hardware

Activity MonitorThe old adage says you can never have too much RAM. I heartily agree with this sentiment which is why, when I bought my MacBook, I opted to spend the extra dosh for a full gigabyte. Granted, I was moving up from an iBook with about 256MB, so that was a nice little jump there. But I figured the two 2.0GHz processor cores would be doing their fair share of heavy lifting.

Though the CPU obviously does help for certain tasks, RAM is still the biggest factor in the kind of work I do. Or so I’ve concluded in the past couple of days, whilst my MacBook has been in the shop. The MacBook replacement I borrowed from the Apple Store has the standard 512MB, and I find the system frequently grinding to a halt. Waiting for things like menus to drop down, or buttons to register that I’ve clicked them—even text I’ve typed to appear—has become agonizing, given the celerity to which I’m accustomed.

Activity Monitor shows that the processor really stays at about 85%-95% idle when I’m just doing some work; the real problem is that I end up with about 4-10MB of RAM free. The truth is that my work largely consists of running several apps and switching back and forth between them. My usual complement consists of Finder, Mail, Safari, Adium, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, and Image Well, with guest appearances by AppleWorks, iTunes, and iCal. And of course, this isn’t counting background system utilities like Butler, Visor, Library Books and a couple others. Not to mention OS X’s kernel_task and Window Server processes which are, as of this moment, eating a combined 95MB. Now, perhaps my usage is heavier than the average person’s, but it’s not as if I’m running Photoshop or FinalCut Pro on top of it all—none of these are “professional” apps. So, hence my question, is 512MB of RAM enough for OS X? Thoughts, comments, pointed questions?

Update: Furthermore, as Joe reminds me below, the integrated graphics on the MacBook eat up an additional 80MB of memory, so it’s not as if I’ve even really got 512MB to start with.


19 Comments

Dan--the man said:

I think 512mb should be considered minimum, not good.

Do you think 64-bit Merom processors will give Apple an incentive to up their current standard of 512mb?

July 25, 2006 9:27 AM
Vinh said:

I switched to a Mac about 3 weeks ago with my purchase of a 2.0 MacBook with 512mb. I've noticed the same hang ups you've described in your post. I hardly noticed it at first, but in the past week, it's really been getting on my nerves. I intend on making the jump to either 1gb or 2gb in the near future...

I usually just have itunes, Adium, and Safari running. Even with just those 3 in addition to the usual processes running in the background like Dashboard, I usually only have about 4-10mb of ram free. I make it a point to completely quit an app if I'm not using it.

My WinXP desktop has 512mb and I wouldn't dare multi-task as often as I do in OSX. In XP, if I'm transfering files or ripping a cd, I'd let the process finish before I'd dare try something else or else something or everything would hang up and crash. In OSX, I was a little hesitant at first, but now I multi-task like a champ.

I think for the most part 512mb is actually acceptable for novice to intermediate OSX users.

July 25, 2006 10:10 AM
Joshua said:

Vinh, I also recently switched to a MacBook 1.83 GHz with 512 MB ram. I do a significant amount more multitasking than I ever did on Windows, but I do notice some slow downs (from RAM). I'm thinking seriously about upgrading one of the 256 MB sticks to a 1 gig, but I'm a broke college student. So it may be a bit. But I'm glad to know that with RAM it does perform a lot better.

July 25, 2006 10:50 AM
Joe The Dragon said:

In the mac book video eats about 80 megs of ram and ppc apps need more ram on x86 then they do running on a ppc system so 512 is too small.

July 25, 2006 10:58 AM
William said:

To be honest, I didn't read the link to carefully and I thought this was some sort of Mac Plus retrospective. (Kb, Mb, it's an easy mistake isn't it?) Nobody will ever need more than 128k, right?

No, 512mb isn't enough. RAM is cheap, time is expensive. I put another gig in the MBP before I even powered it on the first time.

July 25, 2006 11:56 AM
Dan--the man said:

Joshua,

If you want to upgrade another 1GB, I suggest getting two 512MB sticks and replacing both 256mb's. It's best to use RAM in identical pairs with your Mac.

July 25, 2006 12:22 PM
Aaron Author Profile Page said:

I got my iMac at a local Apple Store with 1 GB of RAM, so they kept in the existing 512 MB, giving me 1.5 GB of RAM.

July 25, 2006 12:41 PM
Joe I. said:

The real problem with 512mb in the MacBook is the fact that the video RAM is shared RAM with the main CPU's. Therefore almost 100MB of RAM can be used just to move the display graphics like menus and things. Those interface slow downs I bet would not be there if it had a dedicated GPU system like the 256MB in the MacBook Pro.

July 25, 2006 12:44 PM
Tim said:

How about swap files? I have the 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM and within a few hours of Mail, Safari, Hogwasher, NetNewsWire, Seasonality and Finder I 'll have the system slowing. Within 6 hours I'll have at at least 5 swap files. After a couple more I'll have 2 GB in 6 swap files. From there it hovers but is sluggish. No culprits noted in Activity Monitor. It used to take days of yet more apps coming and going to get there on a 1 GHz G4 with 1 GB RAM.

July 25, 2006 12:59 PM
Cory said:

At the retail location I'm at I suggest to all buyers that 512MB isn't enough, even for the typical user doing just 'word processing, email and Internet' (gotta love that answer). Modern OS bloat also translates to modern application bloat, and frankly, I personally feel all users (basic and beyond) to have a 1GB of RAM or more. It's also a nice way to cut down on the 'my computer's a year or year and a half old and is slow, I need a new one!' which is traditionally attributed to machines with not enough RAM. My little B&W G3 is chugging along nicely one it original processor with a gig of RAM, my PM G5 was slow out of the box with 512MB, had new life once I got up to 1.5 GB and is even happier and 2.25GB. RAM is your friend, at the rate technology is going, it's in everyone's best interest to have more RAM than other specs when it comes to a computer.

July 25, 2006 1:09 PM
Tony Martin said:

512MB is to be considered min, yes, but trying running XP on 512MB... it is about the equivalent of running OS X with 128MB, I exaggerate not.

July 25, 2006 1:45 PM
Imran Anwar said:

I am typing this on my PowerBook G4 17" 2GB machine and just bought my brother a MacBook Pro 15", with upgraded RAM. If I could, I would get 4GB some day. 1 GB should be considered minimum for anyone hoping to take advantage of speedy new machines. That's just In My Humble Opinion.

Imran

July 25, 2006 2:51 PM
Andrew said:

512 with Windows XP works just fine. I have an old Toshiba Portege 4000 with 512MB (16 sapped off for the vampire video) and XP Pro SP2 installed. Its got all of the security fixes, runs antivirus (AVG Free) and still has enough processor and memory to play back DVD movies without dropping enough frames to notice. It is fast and comfortable to use with no slowdowns except for a slow boot time, which I blame on the 4200 RPM drive more than the amount of RAM.

My newish IBM ThinkPad with its 1.6GHz processor and 1.5GB of RAM is just as slow to boot, if not slower, on account of its tiny 1.8" 4200 RPM drive.

July 25, 2006 3:00 PM
funkright said:

I've got a 2ghz macbook with 2gb ram installed and it runs like the wind :) Parallels, Mail, itunes, iphoto, iweb, and idvd all running at the same time with frequent switching does nothing to slow it down (along with all the other stuff going on, including widgets). Best money spent on an upgrade in a very long time. As another poster mentioned, I would never try this amount of multitasking on XP. Even 2 programs like the ones noted above would cause my previous system to grind to a halt, or corrupt the process I was working on, or freeze the system altogether, but not on this macboook! :-)

July 25, 2006 6:27 PM
Randall Smith said:

At times I get better performance out of my Lombard with 512MB of ram than I do out of my G4 mini with 256MB. This usually tends to be when I'm using Safari. That being said, I have a friend with a G4 iMac with 1GB of ram to runs rings around my Mini. However, before he upgraded from 512, his machine wasn't much faster than my mini (and the mini has a .25 Ghz faster chip).

I can also share experiences with Windows XP and minimum ram. I've used a pentium II with 128 MB of ram to run XP... That was painful. Aside from taking 5 minutes to boot, and another 5 minutes to log on (this is a work computer), everything was pathetically slow. I was so glad when we got the P4's!

July 25, 2006 7:08 PM
Tim said:

This is a thought: doesn't the dashboard take up a lot of ram if you like widgets, running all of the widgets on your dashboard alone will make 1 GB a minimum won't it?

July 25, 2006 9:10 PM
Larry Stotler said:

Hmmm, I regularly run openSuSE v10.0 on my PowerBook Wallstreet G3/466 with only 256MB RAM and my Dual Xeon 500Mhz P3 with just 512MB RAM, and I don't see this as an issue. In fact the Xeon only has a 128MB swap partition and it rarely uses it and I keep lots of apps running regularly......Maybe that's why I don't run OS X? Or Windows?

July 25, 2006 9:38 PM
James said:

You can open up Activity Monitor and judge things like ram usage yourself. On my system I have 4 widgets I use, which take ~5 megabytes of ram each...that's a solid chunk, but not something I worry about with 1 gig of ram.

Good thing in activity monitor to look at is to see how many pageouts you're getting--that basically tells you how often your ram fills up and it has to free some up by dumping sections to your hard disk, and is usually the culprit when the interface is slow, or beachballing when switching between programs. When I had 512 on my g4, I would start to get pageouts within an hour of using the machine, which eventually started getting clogged up, which led to an annoying 3-30 second wait when switching between programs or clicking on menus. now at 1 gb, I get almost no paging unless running it for days, or running a large 3d game, and almost never enough paging for the interface to stall. If you're at 512 or lower, ram really is the cheapest and most effective upgrade you can make. Bit 'o food for thought.

July 26, 2006 7:17 AM
soft_guy said:

You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too much RAM in your Macintosh.

July 28, 2006 11:40 AM

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