Lately I’ve noticed that my machine is quite slow and appears to lock up for seconds at a time causing me to pound the keyboard. It is a 2 year old first generation MacBook Pro so that could explain a lot. However, I installed iStat Menus and turned on the CPU and memory items. It turns out that my processor isn’t maxed out all that often (usually only during compiles). When memory usage tops 50%, things start to slow down. As long as I keep memory usage below this, I seem to be OK. This indicates to me that once the OS starts paging to disk, all hell breaks loose. Of course, this is obvious as hard drives are much slower in RAM, but I always like to have lots of stuff open and never paid much attention to RAM usage; with virtual memory, it is easy to loose sight of RAM.
Is there anything I can do about this? Nope. My machine has 2 GB of RAM and that’s all it can handle. Once Apple releases new MacBook Pros, I’ll be ordering one immediately and loading it up with at least 4 GB of RAM (the new machines can handle 4 GB of RAM; hopefully newer ones can go higher). This also brings up something interesting; Apple’s RAM prices are no longer completely outrageous. The current price for loading in 4 GB of RAM in a MacBook Pro is $200 whereas The Chip Merchant sells it for about $100. While it is double, it is significantly less than it was in the past.