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How much RAM do you have installed?
- Thread starter Tesselator
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I'm not denying that 4 is the way to go I just dislike the cost and being forced to. If the machine had been DP this wouldn't be a problem.
32GB in Mac Pro 1 (2009 2x2.26)
48GB in Mac Pro 2 (2010 3.33ghz)
Both are used for retouching large photos (up to 16GB files)
48GB in Mac Pro 2 (2010 3.33ghz)
Both are used for retouching large photos (up to 16GB files)
Sorry about that bro. I didn't figure anyone was still using 512K or 256K modules so made the delineations around even numbers.
thank god I have 4,1. getting 32GBs was really cheap thanks to DDR3 memory. my Pro is single processor so I have only 4 slots but I think I don't need more, I think I could live with 16-24 gigs as well.
if I had 3,1 or less I would need at least 8 gigs but 16 more likely... it's expensive as hell. what's worse is that those prices won't probably go down and you see all the folks selling 1,1s and 2,1s (even 3,1s) for really cheap but usually with 4 gigs only (I think I even saw someone selling 1,1 with 512megs or 1gig - what a joke!).
if I had 3,1 or less I would need at least 8 gigs but 16 more likely... it's expensive as hell. what's worse is that those prices won't probably go down and you see all the folks selling 1,1s and 2,1s (even 3,1s) for really cheap but usually with 4 gigs only (I think I even saw someone selling 1,1 with 512megs or 1gig - what a joke!).
Actually RAM for the 1,1 is the same price as it is for the 4,1. It should be cheaper but it's actually about the same. $250 to $300 for 32GB. On the MP3,1 if you opt for the 800MHz stuff it's about $100 to $150 more tho - so $350 to $450 for 32GB.
Also I think you're right about RAM amounts. I did quite a lot of testing wih different amounts of RAM installed and (for 10.7.5 anyway) 24GB is when the OS quieted down and behaved itself completely. Some aspects of caching and VM are determined by percentages of total and percentages of active, inactive, and free amounts so the larger the total the larger those percentages are. At 16GB the OS was still doing some disk I/O it didn't actually need to but at 24GB everything that could be shut-up was. It still does caching it doesn't need to but again, what could be silenced, was.
One way to quiet things down considerably on your own - no matter how much RAM you have installed is to turn off that nasty dynamic paging system - which I believe the sole purpose of is just to ruin performance.
One can turn this on or off manually with the following:
Turn off dynamic_pager with:
Also I think you're right about RAM amounts. I did quite a lot of testing wih different amounts of RAM installed and (for 10.7.5 anyway) 24GB is when the OS quieted down and behaved itself completely. Some aspects of caching and VM are determined by percentages of total and percentages of active, inactive, and free amounts so the larger the total the larger those percentages are. At 16GB the OS was still doing some disk I/O it didn't actually need to but at 24GB everything that could be shut-up was. It still does caching it doesn't need to but again, what could be silenced, was.
One way to quiet things down considerably on your own - no matter how much RAM you have installed is to turn off that nasty dynamic paging system - which I believe the sole purpose of is just to ruin performance.
One can turn this on or off manually with the following:Turn off dynamic_pager with:
- sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
- sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
It depends who you buy it from. 800MHz very often is yes. The 667MHz stuff is often about the same. Pretty close anyway.
Agree! It's so nice to know you have plenty of RAM for anything you can throw at your system. I have 32GB in my office machine, 16GB at home. A photog friend with a 12 cpu model (who has always sworn that 8GB is enough RAM for CS6 and gently mocks my penchant for hardware overkill) is amazed at how fast my 4 core 2.4 GHZ machine crunches Photoshop batches and everything else. He has major buyers remorse for going with the 12 core, and he's an IT manager. I should mention that I do have a fast SSD boot drive and (4 X RAM = 128GB) SSD scratch disk, per my friends recommendation for optimal configuration. ; )
I don't regret any of the upgrades, all of which I picked up at crazy sale prices (just watch and wait for them). I can open and work with 100+ files no sweat.
I guess that has to do with how the RAM is designed and manufactured? Isn't it strange the 800MHz memory doesn't drop more in price or are orices kept up by the fact that the MPs are "pro machines?
I'm just a happy amateur photographer but I will typically scan 35mm film in Vuescan with my Coolscan 9000 while editing batches of scanned TIFFs in CS5, encoding music from a MiniDisk (who uses _that_ any longer!? I'm a dinosaur), surfing the web and using MS Office. With my current 8GB I do get CS5 crashes sometimes so I hope this will improve with 24GB. It'd be great to be able to have 36-38 images, ome scanned roll, open for editing at a time.
I think it has to do with the amount manufactured and the current demand. The "Pro" part of it is the feature they call "fully buffered" (FB) which is a feature of the RAM module itself. It has a very small buffer and the circuitry needed to operate it. This "Advanced Memory Buffer" (AMB) offers error correction, without imposing any additional overhead on the processor or the system's memory controller. It can also use the Bit Lane Failover Correction feature to identify bad data paths and remove them from operation, which dramatically reduces command/address errors. Small high speed buffers like this act to amplify and "clean up" the signal thus also raising the heat a little higher than normal as well. This solution offers higher integrity but didn't become the most popular one. And this is where the supply and demand bares out the price.
That method is still common and 35mm is still widely used... even on a come-back to some degree. I still use it as well:
Although medium format film can additionally also produce better and different results than 135 - even as good or better than $50K digital back cameras. And of course with larger formats film can go above and beyond anything digital can produce - all to say simply that film isn't dead yet. I don't think loading over 30 images it the best way to process tho. It sounds like you're using PhotoShop. If you are and you're batch processing I'd get familiar with the scripting - it can open, process, and save files before opening the next one unlimited to the number of files.
More RAM will for sure speed up everything PS and LR does tho. From 8GB to 24GB you should see a lot more snappiness and somewhere between 8% and 15% overall speed increase processing a single large file.
It'd behoove people to forgo this suggestion as it disables a key memory management part of the underlying UNIX subsystem. Following Tesselator's suggestion (yes, I've read the data on it...) will result in apps crashing should the box run out of physical RAM.
Bad juju.
Nope. I already tested this to death. It doesn't crash and it never runs completely out of RAM. It still uses VM swap files like normal. What it doesn't do is wait until the system is slightly idle and then start unloading memory pages - thus making the system slow when it needs to load them back in.
We've been doing stuff like this for almost 20 years..It won't do anything until you run out of memory. If you run out it will crash like a MoFo.
I have 16 gigs of ram in my hackpro
its a great number to have right now, this christmas I am going to buy myself 32 gigs of ram and a new gtx 700 series card
Click on one of the highlighted numbers and it shows you the names of those we can make fun of who sit at the 2-4 gig table
its a great number to have right now, this christmas I am going to buy myself 32 gigs of ram and a new gtx 700 series card
Click on one of the highlighted numbers and it shows you the names of those we can make fun of who sit at the 2-4 gig table