Mac recognizes more ram but no performance difference?

I purchase an extra 2 GB of ram for my macbook pro intel core 2 duo laptop for a total of 3 GB. I bought the ram at a pc store outside of apple but is built with the exact specifications of memory bought from apple.

I successfully installed the memory myself and when I booted up the mac and looked under 'about this mac' it showed 3 GB of ram so hip hip hurray i did everything ok.

However, there was no performance difference at all. Opening up music files, to video and even PDF files loaded up no faster than when I had just 1 GB of ram.

I did a mem test and an additional memory test with tech tool pro and everything seemed to be working fine.

Anyone know why I cannot see any performance difference? Actually to be exact, it feels as though the speed has improved about 512 MB but no where near 3GB.

I then took my 1GB ram stick out and just inserted the 2GB ram stick (which is the newly purchased one) and no performance difference occurred.

Even when I talked to customer support of where I bought the ram the guy said that this is quite odd and that the mac should perform much faster.

Any suggestions or solutions?

Thank you.


Dorian

Well, here's something worth saying (although it might not apply to your case).

Sometimes people are unhappy with it taking 2.5 seconds -- or however many seconds -- for a particular program to open (or something of this sort). And, in such cases, people often assume that simply dumping more RAM into a machine will increase the speed of the process. But, of course, this isn't always true. Oftentimes, the perceived slowdown isn't the result of insufficient RAM, but rather other potential bottlenecks in the process (e.g. how quickly the RAM is speaking to the motherboard; the speed of the HDD; etc.).

Try to do something memory intensive, both with and without the additional RAM. And then let us know whether you see a difference.

(EDIT -- Also, because you're not running matching sticks, you're not going to see the benefit of your memory running in dual channel. But, nevertheless, you should see gains on RAM intensive tasks.)

dorian86 said:

Even when I talked to customer support of where I bought the ram the guy said that this is quite odd and that the mac should perform much faster.

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The support rep is sadly mistaken.
RAM does not make a computer faster. The only thing more RAM is going to do is allow you to either run more apps simultaneously or allow RAM-intensive apps more RAM to work with. This increased ability to multi-task and allowance of RAM to programs that need it is very often misconstrued as a boost in speed. Sure, some apps may see a slight increase in their performance and might run some complex tasks slightly faster... but, just because your increased multi-tasking might make you seem to be working faster, and an occasional apps gets a little boost.... doesn't necessarily mean your computer is running at any increased speed.

I was once told to think of RAM as a computer's "arms". The more arms it has, the more things it can do at once.

You'll only see a big improvement when you're working on a lot of big things at once; with a low amount of RAM the computer would be constantly writing the data kept in RAM to the hard disk, and reading the new data from disk, then writing that to RAM. With more RAM it can just keep everything in RAM at the same time and doesn't have to go to the hard disk all the time and keep swapping data.

If you watch this year's WWDC (on Apple's site), Steve gives a demo of a 64bit app and 32bit app working with a 4GB photo. This demonstrates things perfectly. The 64bit app finished the task a lot quicker because 64bit systems can use 4GB+ RAM, whereas 32bit apps are stuck with 3GB RAM. When working with a 4GB photo the 64bit app could keep the whole image in RAM and work on it fairly quickly. The 32bit app couldn't keep all of the image in RAM, so it had to do a lot of data swapping with the hard disk, which is much, much slower than reading from RAM.

Thanks for the helpful tips guys.

So let me see if I get this straight. Your saying simply adding more ram to a mac won't nessesarly boost the start up speed of opening apps such as iphoto, aperture, final cut pro, pdf files etc?

Aside from boosting the performance of working with multiple apps open at once I thought that ram improved the overall performance of a computer even it was only running 1 program.

I remember adding more ram to a pc that originally had 256 MB and increased it by a 512 MB chip and I immediately saw speed improvements as it loading pictures, pdf documents and other files much faster, I thought this would also occur in my case also.

For ex. if I run photoshop will additional ram make running the program much faster overall?

So what dictate the overall speed of a computer?

Thank you for your support.


Dorian

dorian86 said:

Thanks for the helpful tips guys.

So let me see if I get this straight. Your saying simply adding more ram to a mac won't nessesarly boost the start up speed of opening apps such as iphoto, aperture, final cut pro, pdf files etc?

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Yup.

Aside from boosting the performance of working with multiple apps open at once I thought that ram improved the overall performance of a computer even it was only running 1 program.

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It depends on the program. Some programs require more memory than others. And most programs require more memory when working with larger files (for example, a high-resolution image in Photoshop with thirty layers will cause Photoshop to require more memory than a small GIF you copied off of the web.

I remember adding more ram to a pc that originally had 256 MB and increased it by a 512 MB chip and I immediately saw speed improvements as it loading pictures, pdf documents and other files much faster, I thought this would also occur in my case also.

Click to expand...

It does, up to a point. I guarantee your Mac would do everything slower if you removed all but, say 256MB of your RAM. But there is a point at which you have "enough" memory for what you're doing...and beyond that amount, adding more won't speed things up.

For ex. if I run photoshop will additional ram make running the program much faster overall?

Click to expand...

Maybe. In Photoshop's case, it depends, mostly, on the size of the file you're working with, as I mentioned above.

So what dictate the overall speed of a computer?

Click to expand...

Well...
1. The clock rate of the CPU(s)
2. The amount of RAM
3. The number of CPUs and CPU cores
4. The seek time and transfer rate of the hard disk(s)
5. The speed of the front-side bus that connects the CPU and memory
6. The amount, type, and speed of cache memory available to the CPU
...
I could go on, but the real answer is, "A lot of things."

Keep in mind one thing: your memory upgrade will eventually pay off. Newer software, higher-resolution images, and changes in the way you will use your computer in the future will take advantage of that RAM. At the moment, you may have more than you can use...but you'll find a way to use it sooner or later, I'm sure.

Do a defrag (iDefrag) of the HDD. Speeds up an old mac like crazy...

to me i think speed is more of a processor function, and speed of your hard disk, not the RAM, then RAM feels just like buying a bigger car so that you can carry your girlfriend plus her mother...and some few drunk pals, decent leg room....but still, if the car is not having a powerful engine, it will not run fast, and infact it might run slower....u will find that a smaller car, with a super engine will run faster.....that's also why there is a limit on how much RAM u can stuff onto your motherboard... What u will notice will be, for instance, you will be able to open memory hungry applications at once...time that will take to open might not be faster, but your memory will hold more applications at once, meaning you can work on many applications at once....

Hey I got negative reps cause of my post above about iDefrag. Why is this? I'm telling the truth as I've seen it on two of my machines. It also enabled me to install Bootcamp on a nearly full disk. There's always been a problem if your disk has like 25GB free space and you want to make a 15GB bootcamp partition.

I don't know why people are so rude in this forum.

goobimama said:

Hey I got negative reps cause of my post above about iDefrag. Why is this? I'm telling the truth as I've seen it on two of my machines. It also enabled me to install Bootcamp on a nearly full disk. There's always been a problem if your disk has like 25GB free space and you want to make a 15GB bootcamp partition.

I don't know why people are so rude in this forum.

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Kind of messed up seeing though you were just trying to help...

goobimama said:

Do a defrag (iDefrag) of the HDD. Speeds up an old mac like crazy...

Click to expand...

You probably won't need to defragment at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why:

Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. With more free space available, the file system doesn't need to fill up every "nook and cranny." Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.

Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."

Aggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor fragmentation has less effect on perceived system performance.

For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.

If you absolutely think you might need to defragment, try restarting first. It might help, and it's much easier to do.

goobimama said:

Do a defrag (iDefrag) of the HDD. Speeds up an old mac like crazy...

Click to expand...

You probably won't need to defragment at all if you use Mac OS X. Here's why:

Hard disk capacity is generally much greater now than a few years ago. With more free space available, the file system doesn't need to fill up every "nook and cranny." Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible, to avoid prematurely filling small areas of recently-freed space.

Mac OS X 10.2 and later includes delayed allocation for Mac OS X Extended-formatted volumes. This allows a number of small allocations to be combined into a single large allocation in one area of the disk.

Fragmentation was often caused by continually appending data to existing files, especially with resource forks. With faster hard drives and better caching, as well as the new application packaging format, many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time. Mac OS X can also automatically defragment such slow-growing files. This process is sometimes known as "Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering."

Aggressive read-ahead and write-behind caching means that minor fragmentation has less effect on perceived system performance.

For these reasons, there is little benefit to defragmenting.

If you absolutely think you might need to defragment, try restarting first. It might help, and it's much easier to do.

When I moved to the mac, I made it a point not to know the internals of how things work and stuff. I've had enough of this in the windows environment. Now I was told that I don't need to defragment on OS X, and I thought fine, I don't want to know why.

Then my friend's macbook couldn't partition the disk for bootcamp, when I did some research. I found this app, iDefrag, which defragments the HDD and after doing that on the macbook, I could partition for bootcamp. No speed bumps cause it was a new macbook.

Then I tried it on my 1 year old iMac, took me 8 hours to defrag, but the performance difference was very much appreciated. Apps launched faster (idefrag puts them at the start of the disk) and everything was running smoother. Also tried this on a 2 year old iBook, same thing. Much smoother and less disk activity.

Maybe its all psychological, I don't know, but from what I felt, it made a difference.

goobimama said:

Maybe its all psychological, I don't know, but from what I felt, it made a difference.

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It is.
Just your old Windows self hanging on, nothing to worry about.

Seriously though, using a third party app to defrag a drive in OS X is like doing virtually nothing to it. Any increase a person sees is because they perceive it to have done something major to their drive.


This ain't Windows, and you don't have to constantly perform some sort of computer maintenance voodoo magic on a daily basis to keep your machine in tip-top shape.

Okay that psychological part was a joke. Devilboy, try it out and see for yourself. I'm a mac user for two years now, so Windows is not my way of thinking. I hardly do anything to maintain my Mac, and that's the way I like it. But defragging once in a way, like once in four to five months, doesn't hurt that much.

Of course, not defragging OS X is nothing like not defragging Windows, cause in Windows it is necessary or even a quad core will start crawling in a couple of weeks. I'm just saying it helps.

Im really torn with the idea of defragging. My PB is running at a crawl, Im going to restart and see what happens. Ive heard people say that defragging CAN make your mac run slower.

If only you made videos of before and after defrag Goombi.