Do you think this upgrade is worth it?

i have the 2011 27inch iMac , and previously upgraded it from 4 gb to 12 gb, and i saw a pretty good improvement. Do you think upgrading it to possibly 32gb would be a big difference? Thoughts?

Welcome to our forums.

Adding more memory to your 2011 27" iMac probably isn't going to make any difference unless you're doing some heavy graphics work, or crunching big numbers. I have 16GB in my 2014 27" iMac and very rarely use memory over 8GB but 16GB sounds good anyway. Don't waste your money unless you really need the extra memory. ;D

chscag said:

Welcome to our forums.

Adding more memory to your 2011 27" iMac probably isn't going to make any difference unless you're doing some heavy graphics work, or crunching big numbers. I have 16GB in my 2014 27" iMac and very rarely use memory over 8GB but 16GB sounds good anyway. Don't waste your money unless you really need the extra memory. ;D

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Thanks for reply! and well I'm considering it because i have dr cleaner that tells me how much of the memory is getting filled up , and i usually have a bunch of apps opens at once and multitask and i see the number start going up, I've seen it at around 75 percent maybe more full and it was slowly down drastically .

For one I don't like cleaner products. Your iMac is designed to do its own housekeeping through Unix maintenance programs built into the operating system. El Capitan and macOS Sierra handle memory different so don't worry about the numbers. Trust you are not using this Doctor's antivirus software as well?

Maybe increasing your storage and changing to SSD would make more difference to performance than increased RAM.

Justintotech said:

Thanks for reply! and well I'm considering it because i have dr cleaner that tells me how much of the memory is getting filled up...

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Just to make sure we are talking the correct terminology (sometimes folks do not use correct terminology). When you say "memory"...are you talking about RAM or hard drive space?

Justintotech said:

...and i usually have a bunch of apps opens at once and multitask and i see the number start going up, I've seen it at around 75 percent maybe more full and it was slowly down drastically .

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How many apps open at once are we talking about? And what apps are they?

You did not menton what OS version you have installed. But newer versions of the Mac OS deal with things differently. Check "Activity Monitor" and tell us what color the "memory pressure" is (if you're running OS 10.9 or newer).

As others have mentioned above. If things are "normal" (and you already have 12gig of RAM installed)...then adding more RAM will very likely not show much (if any) improvement.

- Nick

Justintotech said:

Thanks for reply! and well I'm considering it because i have dr cleaner that tells me how much of the memory is getting filled up , and i usually have a bunch of apps opens at once and multitask and i see the number start going up, I've seen it at around 75 percent maybe more full and it was slowly down drastically .

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Well, first, while more RAM tends to equal more speed, there is a point of diminishing returns. Macworld did a test a number of years ago and found that (at the time, with the then-current version of the Mac OS) improvements in speed drastically diminished above 8GB. It may be that the point of diminishing returns is higher now, but I doubt it, because recent versions of the MacOS use very advanced memory compression, and they therefore can offer equivalent performance on less RAM than in the past.

Second, I hear constantly from folks who say that Activity Monitor or some other utility is showing that their RAM is "filling up" and they want to "fix it." There is usually nothing that needs to be fixed. Recent versions of the MacOS are designed to make use of RAM that is just sitting free to increase performance. The OS, and many applications, will cache often-used graphics (e.g. windows and folders), or routines, in RAM to increase performance. (That is, instead of having to fetch and load such graphics and routines from your relatively slow hard drive, they are already loaded in RAM, so retrieving them is many times faster.) So, rather than your RAM "filling up" being an indication that your Mac has a problem, it is an indication that your Mac is well designed to use all of the RAM that is available.

Don't get upset by self-serving reports from questionable third party utilities.