1GB to 2 GB on a PB... big performance jump?
Hi all. I Currently own a 17" 1.5 Ghz PB G4. I'm very happy with it, but I'd like to know how much of a noticeable gain in performance 1 more GB of RAM would achieve. Would it be worth the $300?
I work with Photoshop an Illustrator mostly, and ocassionally Flash, Dreamweaver and Final Cut. Is anyone out ther that's made that kind of jump on a similar system? I'd love to hear how much of a gain you achieved. I want to squeeze as much juice as possible out of this thing... unless a huge client come along 8)
I work with Photoshop an Illustrator mostly, and ocassionally Flash, Dreamweaver and Final Cut. Is anyone out ther that's made that kind of jump on a similar system? I'd love to hear how much of a gain you achieved. I want to squeeze as much juice as possible out of this thing... unless a huge client come along 8)
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Originally posted by RANSOMED
Hi all. I Currently own a 17" 1.5 Ghz PB G4. I'm very happy with it, but I'd like to know how much of a noticeable gain in performance 1 more GB of RAM would achieve. Would it be worth the $300?
I work with Photoshop an Illustrator mostly, and ocassionally Flash, Dreamweaver and Final Cut. Is anyone out ther that's made that kind of jump on a similar system? I'd love to hear how much of a gain you achieved. I want to squeeze as much juice as possible out of this thing... unless a huge client come along 8)
See if you need it. After working full blast for a few hours, go to Terminal and type
vm_stat
and see how many "pageouts" you have.
Originally posted by GreggWSmith
What is a good or bad number of pageouts? I had 1057 and that is with 2 gig of RAM on a 1.67 15inch PB
If that's over a fairly long period of use, that's good - it means the virtual memory system only had to "make room" for memory 1057 times since boot. It has to make room when RAM is full and an application either asks for more memory or needs more of its code of data loaded to continue executing. Usually this would be when a lot of memory-hungry things are going on at once.
The key to interpreting pageouts is if they continue to climb at a rapid rate as the system is used since boot. That would indicate that memory is almost always maxed out and more would help.
Each page is 4096 bytes, or 4K. So in your case, it only had to make room for about 4 MB out of a 2 GB pool. Most likely this was in a situation where memory demands were at a peak for a brief time. If RAM is chronically short, the VM system will pageout almost constantly as it switches from one app to another, running up hundreds of thousands or millions of pageouts in a brief period.
Erkle:~ keot$ uptime && vm_stat | grep Pageouts
16:13 up 7 days, 9 mins, 3 users, load averages: 1.83 1.34 1.04
Pageouts: 827007.
I do a lot of 3D rendering, hence almost a million pageouts.
You really have to bench-mark it against period of utilization for it to be a useful metric.
More memory is something you can install yourself quite easily, but while I'm sure you'd benefit from it, having as little as 2GB of open space on your hard drive is still going to be a bottleneck.
My standard warranty has ran out now (didn't get applecare) so I'm not really fussed about having to 'void' it, I'm sure it'll be fine with a detailed manual, will give me a chance to have a look at the damn noisy top left fan as well.
I've installed two 512MB sticks myself so that's no trouble, the HD will be more difficult but it shouldn't be a problem.
I wish there were 160GB drives (or higher). I like having mass storage but there's always a practical issue when your main computer is a laptop. 160GB would probably be perfect so I'm going to wait until those come out.
Then I'd buy one of those higher capacity batteries that Apple is shipping with the revised Powerbooks (or is the battery the same and the hardware just consumes less power?).