OS X upgrade on MacBook Pro mid 2010 trilemma I'd like to have some feedback from those of you who have experience to share about upgrading OS X on MacBook Pro 15" (mid 2010 - MacBookPro6,2).

I'm running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, and I've never needed to upgrade because I use my mac only for software development on the java environment, so I've never needed to stay up to date and I don't even have Apple or Android devices to sync. So, just consider the main use I do of my Mac is about developing on the java platform (ad just for fun).

Now I need to move to Java 7 or maybe Java 8 and I need to upgrade Snow Leopard to one of its successors:


Mountain Lion (10.7.3 at least) 
Maverick 
Yosemite 


Here's my trilemma: which of the aforementioned OS would better fit my laptop's hardware? According to Apple's official site all of them have the same minimum requirements:


2 GB of RAM 
8 GB free HD space


Here's an excerpt from the System Profiler running on my laptop (translated from Italian localization):


Model name:  MacBook Pro
Model ID:    MacBookPro6,2
Processor name:  Intel Core i5
CPU speed:   2,4 GHz
Number of CPUs:  1
Number of cores: 2
Cache L2 (per core): 256 KB
Cache L3:    3 MB
RAM: 4 GB


Please, don't point out the latter are free - I know - just focus on performance. 

Personally, I don't feel like upgrading to Yosemite, but I'd rather move to Maverick. This is not based on figures, just on my gut feelings: I suspect that Yosemite may be too demanding about hardware configuration.

What do you think?
The more advanced version, results in most memory consumption system. So, if you are only care about performance, no doubts, Mountain Lion must be your choice.