iMac running sluggish lately... I simply need more RAM?

[nukiduz]

Hello.
I own a 20" 2ghz, 2gb, aluminum iMac and I feel it's acting sluggish lately. I have been using Photoshop and Lightroom quite hard since I got my first DSLR and I think this machine should handle to manage those apps quite smoothly at the same time; it doesn't and I have to quit Lightroom and even Photoshop acts a bit slow when working with 100mb and above psd files. Maybe I'm asking too much to this machine and I just need more RAM but I'd like to hear what do you say. Thanks!

 

[mzd]

if you are still running the stock 1GB ram then yes, bump it up! ram is very cheap these days. you can max out your machine for around $70. working with files that large in multiple apps uses a lot of ram. you've got the processing power, but i'd say you need more ram.

 

[nukiduz]

Thanks mzd. I have 2gb RAM actually and I see the beach ball and the watch a lot of long times.

 

[rolex54]

look at how much data is in the page out column of system memory in the activity monitor application
if you are using all of your ram at times than there will be a # there

 

[Leon Kowalski]

...acts a bit slow when working with 100mb and above psd files.

More RAM never hurts -- but if it's slower than it used to be, something
else is responsible for the speed change.

How close to full is your hard drive? HDD read/write speeds slow down
by about 50% as the drive goes from "nearly empty" to "nearly full."
So, reading a 100 MB file from the outer tracks (written when the disk
was nearly empty) might take about 1.5 seconds, but reading 100MB
from the inner tracks would require more like 3 seconds. (Those are
approximate raw transfer times for a typical iMac internal drive, they
might be off by +/- 50% -- depending on which disk drive you have,
and what application is doing the reading.)

LK