Monitored the issue for a while now on brand new 30' desktop Mac, had 8Gb to start with.
People recommending RAM upgrade - wasting your time and money. I suggest reading the article for more details, but the Red, Yellow, Green is a great visual tool to help guide where you might be seeing problems.ĭepending on your model, I have personally found Macs suffer more from hard drive access speed than memory limits, so an SSD, if your iMac does not have one, has a huge impact (and unfortunately quite a bit of work to put into your iMac) Luckily, you are running Mavericks, and a new feature of Mavericks is the Memory Pressure graph, described in the Apple support document here: īasically, if the memory graph shows Red, you need more RAM, if its Green, you are good. However, Apple has made it confusing in the past with many memory classifications, like Wired, Swap, Real, etc. This is somewhat analogous to what is happening in OSX and Win7+.
Technically, you really want the OS to capture all the available memory and allocate as needed, in which case, you would see all of the memory being 'used', even though there may be memory available but not allocated by the OS.
Because OSX manages memory (as does Windows) it is often difficult to tell if performance issues are caused by memory limits.
