Dear Forum:
I am buying a new imac and I wondered if 8 gb of Ram is enough. Due to the expense,I am mainly a webdeveloper, it is difficult to pay $400 more for 16 gb.
I am mainly a web developer but with a lot of design i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash.
<ost imacs come with 8 gb. In general, should that be ernough?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Chris
It somewhat depends on how much you do exactly with those tools and if you run them all at once. For example, Photoshop alone can be a massive resource hog. One of my buddies is a photographer, and for several years he used Mac exclusively because of the higher RAM threshold available to Photoshop. IIRC, his photo processing machine had 64GB of RAM and was pegged often.
Your best bet would be to audit your resource needs as you work. Log how much RAM is being used at any given time, how much you dip into virtual memory, and CPU usage. That will give you a good idea of what your needs are for a new machine.
I would recommend at least 16 gigs.
If your doing heavy graphics, and your workflow is memoery inefficient, then you might want to consider 16gb.
However, 8gb will do just fine if you adjust your workflow such that all of your programs arn't "randomly accessing" everything all the time (giving several open programs a chance to page).
EDIT: Also, web development itself will probably not take much memory, unless your website has some intense backend computations (like a finance site perhaps that needs to compute some combinatorial problem live), or if your using it as a live server and it's relatively popular.
8 gb is quite good for your web designing,, but 16gb give you more efficient work.
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