If you often suffer from the spinning Beach Ball you are possibly running short of RAM. The Activity Monitor (found in Applications>Utilities) is a great tool to judge if your Mac has sufficient memory in order to perform efficiently.

When the physical memory (or more commonly known as RAM — Random-access Memory) is full and needs to unload information to the hard disk, the procedure is known as a Page Out. The opposite procedure is known as a Page In. The less RAM you have, the more pagings will take place. This tremendously slows down your Mac.

Observing the Page Out/In values in Activity Monitor is an easy way to gauge if you have sufficient RAM. If these values grow right in front your eyes, it’s a clear sign to add more memory.

Launch the Activity Monitor select the System Memory tab at the bottom and look at the Page In and Page out values. If you notice that your Page Out value is several times the amount of physical memory (RAM) installed on your Mac, you should really consider adding more RAM.

Bare in mind though that this value (Page Out) is higher if you’ve been utilizing several memory-intensive applications like Safari or Pages, Final Cut or Photoshop; not to mention if you’ve been operating for a while without shutting down your machine.