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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

" I strongly recommend the 8GB RAM upgrade, RAM gets eaten up really easily and is definitely worth the extra $100."

While I absolutely and totally agree with you that the 8GB of ram for $100 is a good deal - OS X (at least in 10.7.5) is astonishingly good at making use of shared libraries.

I have 30 applications running right now on my 4 GB 2010 MacBook Air, Including VMware running Windows 7, and Aperture (two hogs) - and the laptop runs really well - even though I do have about 14 GB of pageouts. I think the SSD/Flash Drives finally makes virtual memory useable again.

I'm looking SO forward to upgrading to the 13" Macbook Air (12+ Hour Battery, Insanely fast SSD compared to the 2010 (already pretty fast SSD) - and obviously I'll get the 8GB (I run a lot of VMware instances - and, after about three or four client OS's running - Aperture starts to have trouble cacheing) - but for 90%+ of the population, 4 GB is probably more than enough.

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I stuck a 512GB SSD in my (8GB RAM) 2010 MBP maybe a year(?) ago. The general speed boost was incredible, of course, but the thing that made the biggest impression was definitely seeing several GB paged out, with little performance degredation.

I have had some weird experiences when pushing it hard, though. At one point when I got up to ~15-20GB swapped out, I encountered a kernel panic. I wasn't doing anything fundamentally weird, just loading a large amount of data into "RAM".

I should try it again and see what happens. I wonder how hard Apple stresses this functionality in QA?

All of my kernel panics and spinners of death were due to running some Java IDE or XML tool loading up 100MB files and the like (sometimes in-memory parse trees for those sized files can push the heap to multi GB levels).

Were you using a JVM when you ran into the system glitches?

No, the memory-hungry process I was running was reasonably simple C that I'd written myself. It was semi-contrived, reflecting the extreme of an internal use case, but fundamentally I was just moving around/massaging bytes in big, boringly-malloc'd blocks of memory.

I can't swear that there were no Java processes running on the machine at the time, though. And I often have a Windows or Linux VM running in the background.

I stuck an intel SSD in my 2011 mbp, as well as 16gb of ram (it was really really cheap..).

I disabled the pagefile completely, and things are as snappy as ever - I can't think of an application I use that would use up so much ram that I need to page to disk.

Well, 8GB of RAM also future-proofs you a little bit, and 4GB is starting to reach the cusp... 6GB would probably hold you over for the foreseeable future, but convention dictates 2GB => 4GB => 8GB.

It's also about dual channel configurations. You get better performance out of two identical memory sticks.

The effect is minimal though, 2-3% improvement if I recall.

Might be the OS X version but my work 2012 MBP, 10.8.4, has 4 GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. With a text editor, an email client, a couple of terminals, a couple of chrome tabs and an IDE open, the RAM gets loaded and the swap starts to trash. I get huge slowdowns all the time.

With my own MBPr (10.8.4), I have 8GB and never get into similar cases. And having a SSD instead of the HDD, I don't fear nearly as much the day I'll hit the swap.

The OS itself takes over 1.2GB of RAM, add to that ~1GB for the IDE (IntelliJ), ~1 GB for Chrome tabs, that's already > 3GB. Add the terminals, email client, various other processes and daemons... 4 GB is not much.

Re: Work MBPr - just curious, but did your work load down your native image with a bunch of Security Crap? I know a lot of people who have complained that once IT gets ahold of the MBPro, the systems become effectively 1/3rd the performance. Also - the SSD makes an insane impact on performance.

But - Yes, I think everyone on HN can agree - we'll all get 8GB when we have to make the decision.

My work MBP has a spinning drive and FileVault 2 (whole disk encryption) turned on. Anything I/O bound (booting, starting applications, paging) is super slow.

Yup it is, that sheds some lights on the huge gap of performance.

Does the work machine have a 5400 rpm drive? I know that a 7200 wouldn't touch the speed of an SSD, but I'm wondering if slightly more rotational speed makes any difference with swap/otherwise. I'm starting to see quite a bit of slowdown on my 2010 MBP and the worst offender is always when it has to hit the HDD, yet I already have maxed the RAM.

Spinning rust + low RAM in OSX = not a nice time. Is there a reason you can't just upgrade your work laptop to have 8GB?

I've asked for 8 GB, I think it's on the way.

Off-topic, but I'm curious about why you use VMWare instead of VirtualBox.

I actually use VirtualBox when I'm running Dynamips (it has good hooks when launching network connected clients) - but for day-day productivity, Windows 7 Unity Mode in VMware is pretty great.

I can double click on a .vsd file and have it launch in Visio as a close-to-native app. Also, (and this may sound stupid, but it's handy) the little "Double-Arrow Start Icon" on my Menu Bar is handy for launching Windows Apps.

On my Windows Desktop System I use VMware Workstation because it reliably shuts down and restarts my linux guests, without me logging in to windows. (Though it took me a while to find out out how to do that). I.E. on a windows restart, VMware workstation gracefully shuts down the Client Operating System, and after reboot (and prior to me logging into the Windows Environment - I.E. Before I get to the office) - it restarts VMware Workstation service (not the app), and then restarts whatever Linux Guests I've selected in the "Shared VMs" panel.

This is important, as my Windows 7 Desktop System is now being rebooted by Microsoft two-three times a month for security updates - which I'm fine with as long as my Linux guests are there when I want them.

I can't speak for the OP, but my office chose VMWare over VirtualBox after finding VMWare to be about 3x faster running the unit tests for our main code repository, which are both I/O and CPU intensive.

I had similar findings in my office, with Parallels actually topping the list. I'm not sure if that was a fluke or not, as it was a windows VM that I needed to run, but VMWare definitely surpassed VirtualBox for that and some other tests.

I've used both on my various Macs, and I find that VMware Fusion generally seems to perform better. Parallels Desktop seems to have better virtualized 3D, though, so I've found myself moving more to that.

>> Off-topic, but I'm curious about why you use VMWare instead of VirtualBox.

Faster, integrates much better into OS X, seamless mode, 3D acceleration, better linux guest tools, easier updates, lots of reasons actually.

VirtualBox is pretty good by itself, but I found that VMWare Fusion more than makes up for its (very reasonable) price.

My office as well was a heavy user of VirtualBox until Vagrant 1.1 hit, and then we dropped a pretty penny on VMWare licenses.

One of the biggest things we noticed was a big bump in IO, especially with shared folders. We also experienced random mysterious crashes and hangs with VirtualBox, seemingly related to sleep/wake.

Less technical, but the VirtualBox interface looked like complete ass on OSX for the longest time.

VMware definitely seems faster (I'm running Windows 8 as a VM inside Linux), but seeing as it's a paid product, there'll be choice-supportive bias all over the place.

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