[ksk]

I have 4GB and yeah, my hdd is non-SSD. But it wasn't this bad back when I was working with snow leopard. Unfortunately Apple forces you to get their new OS to use the new Xcode and that has screwed my performance.

I've disabled a bunch of things, Spotlight indexing, dashboard, their notification stuff, etc and also moved swap to a new partition, its helped, but still not as snappy as when it was new.

At the moment, I'm weighing my choices .. do I upgrade RAM,SSD or do I get a new one - but then I have to buy apple's expensive ram and cant easily change the SSD in the future.

[Hansi]

If you max the RAM to 8GB and add a SSD it will be a completely new machine. Also not that hard to do, well worth it. I have the 2011 model and updated first from 4 to 8 and then 16GB of RAM and from a standard HDD to Crucial M4 500GB and the machine is a beast, must faster in 10.9 than when I originally bought it.

[oscilloscope]

Apple added memory compression in Mavericks, so upgrading to the latest OS may improve your situation. Disclaimer: I don't actually know.

[cjkarr]

I upgraded my late-2008 iMac with Mavericks to see if it performed better than Mountain Lion given that my machine's maxed out at 4GB of RAM and my experience thus far has been that overall, the system is more responsive, but there's a lot more latency in doing things like restoring backgrounded applications that haven't been quit, but are still running. It may be that my machine is too old, but Mavericks has just shifted the latency around in this case.

[danbee]

Just maxing it to 8GB will make a vast difference. You don't have to buy RAM from Apple. http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=5A1D576...