What's the REAL memory requirements of OSX 10.6?

Question

I'm running a 3 year old Mac Mini with 2G and Snow Leopard. I'm currently finding that after a couple of days, the machine grinds to a halt with thrashing to VM. I'm running a lot of programs, but I sort of need to run all of them:

• 10.6
• firefox
• mac mail
• xcode
• emacs
• Timbuktu Pro
• FileMaker Pro
• terminal
• itunes
• 4-5 other random programs

that seems like a lot, but it wasn't a problem in 10.5... Since the mini can only take 2G, can anyone point me at a site that will convince my boss that I need a bigger computer? B-)

Answer 1

SL on 2GB should be fine. The problem is most likely Firefox. As much as I love it, the Mac versions have always been less-than-stellar. If you're using a lot of add-ons, it can contribute to the problem. Many are poorly written and leak memory.

If you'd like to pin down what is eating up all the RAM, just open activity monitor and look at ram usage by process.

Answer 2

Gotta agree. My MacBook Pro (1st unibody model +SL ) has 2Gb and runs perfectly for weeks without a reboot.

I switched to Chrome from Firefox ages ago :-)

One thing to check though.. have you recently added a load of fonts, or PDFs to your machine? Spotlight can churn away for ages indexing those which can affect performance. (Might be a good way to convince your boss to fund an upgrade though... just dump a load on there and show him how 'slow' your machine is!)