I’m not quite sure why, but OS X Lion seems to demand a lot more RAM than its predecessor, the snowy Leopard. I’ve been using Lion since it came out earlier this July and had been enjoying the OS, but it dawned on me that my Mac was feeling a lot slower than I remember. I’m using a 13″ MacBook Pro from 2009 and, up until July, the machine was just as snappy as the day I’d bought it.
The culprit remains a mystery to me (I know it’s not just Safari), but the overarching issue for me is that I’ve been consistently running out of RAM. I was fine with 4GB of memory up until Lion hit, but ever since the OS upgrade, I’ve been hitting my head against 6MB of free memory while running just these apps:
- Dropbox
- f.lux
- iTunes
- Things
- Safari (4–5 tabs open; Flash installed)
- Alfred
Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem like a ton to me…and yet it’s been more than enough to bring my machine to its knees. I don’t often see the spinning beach ball, but I’ve been enduring some very extended load times for simple apps like TextEdit whenever free RAM gets low.
I tried a couple of things, such as uninstalling Flash, switching from Alfred to Launchbar, and using Chrome, but nothing really helped, so my solution has been to spend a little over $60 to purchase 8GB of RAM from Other World Computing. I’ve spent the evening trying to use all of it up, but as of several apps ago, I’m still at 3.25 GB free, with all of the above-mentioned apps running, and a few others:
- iPhoto
- iA Writer
- TextExpander
- iMovie
With any luck, I’ll have solved my own RAM issues, but I am a little surprised at how memory-hungry Lion has turned out to be. I’m even contemplating going for a fresh install, but I’ve got a fair amount of work to finish before I can afford to do that.
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