07-14-2011, 11:37 PM

So, I've been trying to figure out of I should get more memory from my computer.

this is my hardware. It's a 17" MBP i bought two years ago. i've been using Final Cut Pro a lot lately and it's been slow then. tonight, while using Compressor, it got super slow. I've been thinking of upgrading to 8GB of RAM thinking this might solve my problems. That said, I'm not sure how to read memory specs and make sense of them. hopefully some people here will. Any idea why it is slow? Should I get more RAM?

I've attached two screen shots of Activity Monitor when it was acting very, very sluggish. This is my hardware:
Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,2
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 3.06 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP52.008E.B05
SMC Version (system): 1.42f4
Serial Number (system): 73936002ANE
Hardware UUID: C6B9FF1A-F420-5843-B7FE-C706ABE747A9
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled

07-15-2011, 11:18 AM

Safari seems to be quite the memory hugger there. Will free almost half a GB if you quit that. I have noticed that lot's of browsers use a bunch of memory when they are running for a while.

Do I see that right that you have 3.75GB of RAM? Should be plenty, but you can definitely add some to have your system run smoother. At the end: It's not a very expensive upgrade.

07-15-2011, 02:02 PM

I think you'll definitely benefit from an increase in memory. You can see you're paging GBs of data to the disk and are maintaining a sizeable swap file. I think adding RAM will help - definitely.

07-16-2011, 11:19 PM

When you are running thse memory hogs, you can't be running anything else. So you need to shut down everything and then start again just with the one you want. if you want to be able to run a bunch of these art once you probably need 10 or 12 Gigs RAM.

You should also check on-line for tips about how to speed up the applications. For Aperture 3 for example, there are a whole series of libraries to delete and some other things to do.

Also, Final Cut is not only a memory hog, it requires a fast video card. So your bottleneck is your video card. Anything you can do to lessen the drain on the video card can speed up Final Cut and Aperture.

It goes without saying that its summer and if your MBP is getting really hot, put a fan on it. Heat will slow down the processor a lot.