Is this the right memory?

[Apple!Fre@k]

If my 2.16GHz 24" iMac with 2GB of memory gets any slower, you shall soon see a video of it on YouTube strapped to a spashboard in my backyard with a few dozen 5.56 rounds entering the screen from my new rifle. Honestly, I realize I have a lot of Internet windows open (usually about 5 or 6 with 20 tabs open in each), but should my iMac be so slow that I see the spinning ball for minutes at a time each every few clicks that I'm ready to blow my own head off?

I'm hoping maxing it out with another gig of memory might do the trick. If it doesn't, as much as I love my iMac, I very possibly could be investing in a Mac Pro soon.

Here's the memory I was looking at. Will it work? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134670

(Side note: Amazing how much the price of RAM has gone down since I was last in the market for it a year and a half ago. Seems like 1GB was $150 back then. Now it's 25 bucks.)

 

[Eidorian]

How much Flash stuff is running in those tabs and under what browser?

 

[Apple!Fre@k]

How much Flash stuff is running in those tabs and under what browser?

Most of it is in Firefox. From what I can tell, probably 20% of the pages have some Flash on them. Not heavy Flash, but some some flash stuff. The open tabs in Firefox slow my iMac down to where it's almost unusable so for now, since there's the restore tabs feature, I just have Firefox closed so I can do other things. In the meantime, I use Camino. Oddly, Safari is unusable at almost all times. Even with one window and one tab open, Safari is slower than walking to China. It even takes a while to open and I get the beach ball as it opens so I only use Safari when both Firefox and Camino are stalled.

Honestly, it's slower than ****. When all web browsers are closed, my iMac runs great and I can do anything else with it and will hardly ever see the beach ball. But when Firefox is open with a lot of tabs (and sometimes Camino), watch out. I can sometimes take a nap in the time it takes for the beach ball to go away after it starts. In fact, I've had a meal, come back, and the beach ball is still spinning.

If Apple could make a guarantee with the Mac Pro configured at $6K that I would never see the beach ball again, I'd buy it right now, even though I could never previously see myself spending $6,000 on a computer.

 

[Eidorian]

Have you checked Activity Monitor to see how many Page Outs you're getting under normal browser usage?

 

[WarMachine]

The usual culprit for browser underperformance is flash, so all complaints should go to adobe. But there are some Firefox extensions that disable sites from automatically loading flash banners which might help you out if that truly is your problem. Also, try using Safari for a bit and see if you get the same problems. I know that Firefox has a cap on how much memory it can use, and Safari doesn't, so you might see an improvement after some prolonged use, but do remember that flash has always been a little buggy on Mac OS X, so expect to see the beach ball from time to time when loading flash animations, although you shouldn't see them for more than a few of seconds.

2GB of RAM is more than enough to run a simple browser, so I wouldn't even bother getting more. At most, you can check that what you have is working fine, which I suspect is the case if the problem only pertains to browsers.

Just for kicks, try repairing permissions on the volume, see if helps (Go to Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, select your drive and under First Aid, select Repair Disk Permissions).