Q: Lion - Memory Usage Problems

Can't agree.

Defining 'enough physical memory' is easy enough as long as you know what will you do with your system. And it is not too expensive to have enough physicial memory as long as your put your work performance as top priority. All my work systems have enough RAM for my needs.

Swapping/paging, compression, etc... are ways to make you able to operate on application work set that aren't fit into your computer's physicial RAM, but it costs you time.

The problem is OSX starts swapping even in case your all work set fit into memory available for applications and frankly I don't see how compression would solve that. It might make problem less noticable, noticable a little later.

Fast SSD would make issue less noticable as well, since you won't notice paging, but SSDs are still an order of magnitude slower than RAM.

please folks: go back earlier in the thread and read: the problem with the memory leakage in safari is JAVA. that's it. https://discussions.apple.com/message/21421263#21421263

you can turn off java in safari by clicking in the menu bar on:

Safari -> Preferences -> Security

the newest versions of safari (v6.04 and above, i think) allows you to turn off java entirely or to scope which sites have which access.

my advice: turn it off or upgrade to mountain lion. the problem with safari and java memory leakage doesn't occur in the newest OS.

It would be nice if that old post were accurate, but it is not. It would also be nice of memory leaks didn't exist in Mountain Lion, but they do. And in fact, where Safari is not the culprit the OS's new memory management is, and there's no getting around that other than Apple fixing it.

Regarding Safari, the only solution is to disable JavaScript, which means most of the interesting (and even many of the mundane) web pages in the world will not work anymore. Java is hardly ever the source of the problem because hardly any web pages in the world make use of Java.

The next best solution is to periodically exit the browser. In 10.9 Safari will apparently run each window in its own process, which is how Chrome has worked for at least a couple of years. That means simply that if you close your window, the memory will be freed up from whatever was going on in that window. Today, with Safari, closing the window does not free up all the memory, which is why completely exiting the browser is necessary.

BTW - periodically closing the browser, along with a whitelist cookie add-on, is the best way to maintain some semblence of privacy on the web, so that's something else to think about as well.

The Lion OS X memory problem exists even if I don't use Safari or another web brouser.

Usually I opened AutoCAD and Outlook and the Lion was very slow on my MacBook Pro a1278. So what I need to do if I want to open more programs? For example Skype, Photoshop, Evernote etc.

The answer is go back to Leopard OS X. I did it and I am very satisfied. I can open all programs I need at once and browse through Chrome without any problems.

The only drawback is some programs from AppStrore don't even install because I have OS X below 10.7 version. But it doesn't bother me because I need not them for my work.

May as well visit this again. This image illustrates silliness, foolishness, unacceptable and anything else you can think of that describes this old problem that some people here try to explain away and Apple seems to ignore.

$3000.00 for a 2013 Mac Pro 3.2 Quad (10.8.5) with just Mail, System Monitor and Safari 6.1 (extensions disabled) open and attempting to Monday Nigh Football on NBCSports.com.

Every 7-10 minutes, the feed becomes what looks like really bad stop motion photography (or like a .gif with just one frame for every 5 seconds of action). Occasionally, the system will just release everything so it can again slowly eat up all of the memory for no apparent reason. It's just appalling and I'm disgusted with Apple.

My uptime is 1 day and 4 hours. I've been watching football (attempting to anyway) for 2 hours.

I was so frustrated I wasn't thinking or typing clearly above.^^^

"Watching" "Thurday" Night Football.

Maybe Mavricks will fix it.  My 2007 MacBook(Lion) works a lot better since I stuck a SSD in it, but I still have to reboot every couple of days due to choppy scrolling.

@urabus Since this happens to you quickly and reliably, maybe you will be willing to send us another screenshot the next time it happens: activity monitor sorted by Real Mem.

I want to see which process is using up the most physical RAM. My guess is Safari but we really need to see for sure. There is probably either a bug in the thursday night football site, OR, a bug in Safari.

I guess it could've been something with NBCSports's feed but with all the memory issues mentioned and discussed here I half doubt it. And, I will say this too: the perticular page did state that Window's users would have a "richer" experience. Still though, my my first Mac Pro in 2005 suffered from website compatibility issues everywhere you turned but the was the cost of owning a rock-solid PowerPC Mac. Issues like that are (and should be) all but gone.

If I can re-create this again, I will definitely submit a complete snapshot.

My OS is installed on a SSD. And for those who haven't made the leap - the difference is amazing.

The only thing SSD do is mask the problem. And yeah, since SSD is faster than HDD paging doesn't seem so ugly and slow as on HDD.

And no, don't propose 'purge', since it have never been intended as a way to solve memory handling issues.

It's a shame for Apple. They have never even acknowledges that they have a problem, and not just any problem, but the fundamental problem. How are others solved it, Windows, Linux ...? Is a memory management really so difficult task for a big company like Apple which is entangling in it for years and cannot find the way out?

I'd replace cannot with don't want. The funny thing is that in OSX 10.4 memory management have been working flawless, but starting with 10.6 (I haven't tried 10.5) memory management have been broken.

I wonder if any of the engineers at Apple have even read this thread.

Apple with this attitude toward their products (OS X) and its users confirms the impression of some analysts that the company is 'tired' and have increasingly difficult to cope with the competition.