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I'm running on an i3 processor, 2010 model, 3.06 GHz.

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I'm currently have 4GB of RAM, but if I were to upgrade to 16GB, would:

  • Applications open quicker?
  • FPS increase in game?
  • Overall performance increase?

Thanks for your help.

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Just a bit of a rhetorical comment. Your Mac isn't even using all 4 GB it has with 1.29 GB of free, surplus, basically wasted RAM. If you needed to open a new program that took 1 GB of RAM, there would be no delay. Unless you regularly need to open large programs past what is open when this was taken, that extra RAM could sit there unused even though your Mac would be more capable in the "just in case I launch all of Office and Photoshop" situation. – bmike♦ Feb 1 at 14:36
I'm not near my Mac, but the page outs in your screenshot seem abnormally high (4 times more than your RAM). Paging happens when you run out of free RAM and a swap file (4.8GB in your screenshot) on your hard disk is used instead. Your hard disk is an order of magnitude slower than RAM so high page outs can indicate that you might benefit from some more RAM. osxdaily.com/2010/10/29/… – deizel Feb 1 at 17:50

2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Looking at your memory usage you don't need more RAM.

To answer your questions:

  1. Apps may open faster if you are running lots of heavy duty apps, like Photoshop, Xcode, etc…

  2. I doubt you'd see much of an increase in the FPS in games. That depends on the video card and how well the game is written.

  3. Overall performance increase would probably be minimal. The biggest bottleneck is if you are running off a spinning disk, upgrading to an SSD would probably be the biggest performance gain, depending on what you use your computer for.

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1  
Thanks for the answer - very helpful. Will accept in 5 minutes. – user1453094 Feb 1 at 14:02
Mark nailed it here. More RAM lets you do more things before the computer has to shuffle things out of RAM to disk. Things like games can have huge RAM requirements so that they pre-caclulate things and can then play them back later - just like Photoshop or Xcode can use lots of RAM to store work in progress. Most games where FPS is measured don't need RAM, but a fast GPU and CPU to draw scenes rapidly in reaction to changing game dynamics. – bmike♦ Feb 1 at 14:33
Looking at the swap space being used, a reboot will recover that space from your hard drive and speed up the machine, but this isn't really a fix if you are working on this machine all day. – Mark Thalman Feb 1 at 21:23
up vote 0 down vote

If you are using many programs at the same time e.g many browser tabs and you are left with little free RAM then yes, you will see performance increased.

It really depends on the usage. I can't work on a computer with less than 8GB of RAM (many, many chrome tabs, iTunes, and 3-4 programs open at the same time). But many people are OK with 4GB.

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