Does Ram really make as big of a difference on a Macbook as I've heard?

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I have a 2011 MBP 13. Now, I know that Ram will help me, I'm trying to run XCode and I'm just out of memorying all over the place, sometimes I'll have a 2Gb+ page file going...and I have 4Gb of ram! Now, Research has shown that "More than 4Gb Ram can improve performance by up to 30%" On a PC this is false, however is this true for my macbook? It's only $80 and if the difference is a big as it sounds then I will go for it.
 

bobtomay

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I'd like to see that "research".
 
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Pull up activity monitor curious how many page in /outs you have now.
 
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MacTrast Reviews: Crucial 8GB RAM Upgrade For 2011 MacBook Pro | MacTrast
apple - Does more RAM on Mac really improve performance? - Super User
ETC.

Let me load up Xcode and get some work done to get you some page in/out numbers, The Swap used often goes above 1.5 to past 2Gb.
Now, granted, I'm normally also running chrome (but only one or two tabs), noting crazy here.

Also, I have experienced a few OOM issues while running games such as Team Fortress 2,(now as you know, that does not page well,lol boom crash, you lose this round, you get the idea)
I'm just surprised how poorly memory is managed here on the mac, I'm using way more ram than I ever had on a windows machine, is it Leopard or Lion?(Same issue on both) I mean Tiger used to run just peachy on my old eMac. less than 512Mb of ram usage and all.
 
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09 MBP 8GB ram 500GB HD OS 10.9 32B iPad 4 32GB iPhone 5 iOs7 2TB TC Apple TV3
MacTrast Reviews: Crucial 8GB RAM Upgrade For 2011 MacBook Pro | MacTrast
apple - Does more RAM on Mac really improve performance? - Super User
ETC.

Let me load up Xcode and get some work done to get you some page in/out numbers, The Swap used often goes above 1.5 to past 2Gb.
Now, granted, I'm normally also running chrome (but only one or two tabs), noting crazy here.

Also, I have experienced a few OOM issues while running games such as Team Fortress 2,(now as you know, that does not page well,lol boom crash, you lose this round, you get the idea)
I'm just surprised how poorly memory is managed here on the mac, I'm using way more ram than I ever had on a windows machine, is it Leopard or Lion?(Same issue on both) I mean Tiger used to run just peachy on my old eMac. less than 512Mb of ram usage and all.

I would not say Mac's manage memory poorly but have had the ability to make use of more ram and sometimes a program can be written poorly.
 
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BTW:
Page in: 7.2Gb
Page Out: 1.1Gb
Page file size: 2.67Gb
This is with one Xcode project and a tab of chrome running.
This is on lion and is actually bette than SL in which no chrome would get me this much.
 
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This will explain it better also take note of how much free memory you have and since
you don't have a dedicated video card part of the memory is shared ram. Does my mac need more memory?
 
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This will explain it better also take note of how much free memory you have and since
you don't have a dedicated video card part of the memory is shared ram. Does my mac need more memory?
Free memory = 0, lol.
oh, OOM error how I love thee.

(I just got 8Gb of Apple Certified DDR3 1333. :) )
They say I'll get 512Mb of Vram instead of 386 with this, not complaining at all....
 

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