[Frank777]

I'm trying to find out if there's a benefit to maxing out the RAM on this 10,1 iMac (I currently have 12GB instead of 16.)

Booted up Activity Monitor and went looking for the 'Show Memory Usage in the Dock Icon' feature.

Did this get removed from Mac OS Sierra? I thought it was there before...

[chucker]

This was probably removed in Mavericks, because a concept of unused memory has gotten increasingly meaningless. Would be nice to have that memory pressure chart in the Dock, though, I suppose.

[turtle]

Is there a benefit to maxing the RAM, always. The question is do you want to put the money into it. Personally I would because I think the extra 4GB would be worth it. While the OS is pretty good about managing memory, more is always better when it comes to RAM.

How it handles RAM is interesting. Like, right now I have 1GB of compressed memory with over 20GB free. Why it compressed the memory I have no idea, but it doesn't really matter anymore.
Volstagg, Hackintosh:


Mongo, 2010 17" MBP:

If you look at that graph and your pressure is high then you really need it. Looking at the management of the RAM between these tow machines and it is easy to see why Apple says we don't need to rush to more than 16GB. I guess Apple doesn't think much about people running VMs on their machines that take RAM and hold it.

[Frank777]

Originally Posted by chucker This was probably removed in Mavericks, because a concept of unused memory has gotten increasingly meaningless. Would be nice to have that memory pressure chart in the Dock, though, I suppose.

Thanks. I knew it was there before, just haven't used it in awhile. You never miss something till you need it.

Originally Posted by turtle Is there a benefit to maxing the RAM, always. The question is do you want to put the money into it. Personally I would because I think the extra 4GB would be worth it. While the OS is pretty good about managing memory, more is always better when it comes to RAM.

Yeah, I just bought it and installed it tonight. Machine actually felt slower for awhile , but I'm sure that was just the restart and Time Machine kicking in or something. It's back to normal now and hopefully I'll see a difference when I get back to work later on.


My next move this weekend is to do open-heart surgery and install a 1 TB SSD, though that's a bit beyond my comfort zone.
Why does Apple have to make that so difficult?

[PB PM]

Another sign that you need more RAM is high SWAP file counts, which means the unit is hitting the HDD/SSD for memory when the RAM fills up.

More RAM may slow down boot times and wake from sleep, since it has more to getting going again (slower boot because the system does a basic RAM test on boot, more RAM longer testing time). Still totally worth it.