Does more RAM increase 10.2 speed?

D

Durbrow

Registered
If I understood a previous thread correctly, more RAM does not necessarily increase speed in 10.2. I have a 256 MB RAM PowerBook g4 400 mhz. Will increasing to 512 or beyond increase speed? I tend to use:

Word
Internet Explorer
Chimera
Mail
OmniOutliner

Many thanks for any clarification. Oh! I have 4 GB free on my harddisk. Thanks.

edurbrow@earthlink.net
 
if you have 256 you will more than likely notice a performance gain in more ram. I recently upgraded from 256 to 512 on my B&W G3 and it did make a difference. Mostly because I had a ton of Virtual memory swapping when changing apps. With the price of RAM these days you might as well. It's not going to hurt anything
 
You want as much ram as you can afford. 10.2 eats up ram like crazy. All your windows are stored in ram, everything is dependant on ram..well almost everything. 512mb is the sweet spot with 10.2 :)
 
I am still on X.1.5 but i upgraded my ibook from 384 to 640 and i really only noticed a difference when i had alot of programs open or if i was using photoshop with alot of large files and such.

jeffo
 
10.2 feels snappier on my Powerbook G3 upgraded from 192 to 384Mb. Not hugely noticeable as a performance jump, but it all just feels... better. Don't think it'd keep getting better and better tho, don't see any point going past 1152 in my G4!
 
Open the Terminal and type vm_stat. It will show you statistics for use of the HD for swapping out parts of memory. If you have lots of memory relative to the demands of your software this will be small or zero. If you run RAM intensive applications this will be nonzero. You can check it from time to time after running different apps to calibrate your understanding of these numbers.
 
I did a vm stat in Terminal after upgrading from 256 to 700+ and here is what I get:

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 88941.
Pages active: 48801.
Pages inactive: 39872.
Pages wired down: 18994.
"Translation faults": 12491796.
Pages copy-on-write: 44524.
Pages zero filled: 1192465.
Pages reactivated: 58613.
Pageins: 13265.
Pageouts: 918.
Object cache: 24686 hits of 541096 lookups (4% hit rate)

Can you tell me exactly what I am looking for? I am new to terminal/darwin. Thanks.
 
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