More Memory

I have an iMac 27-inch (late 2013), 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M with 1024 MB VRAM. Running macOS Safari v 10.12.4

Seems I am seeing the spinning 'beach ball' more and more and things taking longer to load. This will speed up after rebooting so thinking memory and adding another 16GB of DDR3 RAM will speed things up?

It seems to me the bottleneck could be the 1gb video ram.

Where are you seeing the slowdowns? Internet, loading apps, using apps? Which apps specifically?

I agree. A fairly recent iMac with 16GB of RAM is more than adequate to run macOS Sierra. Adding more RAM isn't going to make any significant difference.

Answers to ferrarr's questions will help us to pinpoint the possible cause(s) of your spinning beach ball.

And this link from one of our members might be of interest to you in the meantime: http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Ian

Seems I am seeing the spinning 'beach ball' more and more and things taking longer to load. This will speed up after rebooting so thinking memory and adding another 16GB of DDR3 RAM will speed things up?

Click to expand...

In addition to the suggestions you've already received, you might want to boot to recovery and run first aid on your hard drive. Slowdowns like you describe are not normally attributed to graphics or memory but could very well be a hard drive that is failing. The first thing you really should do is make a full backup even if it takes a long time to complete. Afterward, you can boot to recovery (command plus r) select utilities, Disk Utility, and run First Aid on the bottom entry (Macintosh HD).

The Video RAM is likely not the problem. Your 16GB of memory is also perfectly fine unless you are using a VERY memory/CPU intensive application like photo editing or video editing and dealing with files are are VERY large.

You haven't provided enough details to determine the cause of the beach balls. As the others have stated, your machine is more than capable of running the latest version of macOS without any issues. I have a 2009 iMac that runs Sierra very nicely.

First, provide a list of applications that you are running, also list of apps that are running but only have a Menu Bar icon. Next, open up Activity Monitor and look at the CPU and Memory utilization after a reboot, and continue to monitor them as you use the computer normally. Tell us what that looks like and we can provide additional things to isolate the issue..

How full is the storage on this computer (gigs free & gigs used)?

- Nick