Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

0 points

very poor memory management

Hello,

I got a really bad impression on a memory management in Mountain Lion. Here's the situation.

My daily routine reuqires quite a lot of ram: 1-2 eclipse instances, virtual box, chrome with many tabs. For that I bought 8GB of that goodie.
To my surprise, nothing much has changed! usually In just a few days disk swap fills up to 8GB and I get a total of 16GB (RAM + SWAP) memory usage!

The worst part is that closing down the applications doesn't help, I get only a few additional gigs of ram free.

I understand that mac uses free RAM memory to cache stuff, but why the heck it should use 8GB of swap?

Activity monitor also is not helpful to determine who's taking up all the mmeory. Usually it shows ~1.3GB for kernel, 1.3 for virtualbox and around 1GB for chrome.

So, after whining for a few lines, here is my question:
Is there any way to influence OSX memory manegement?

Are there any sophisticated memory view tools to track down the cause of such a "loose" memory manegement?

Thanks,

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on Apr 22, 2013 6:10 PM

18 replies

etresoft

Level 8

46,988 points

Feb 2, 2014 4:07 PM in response to gingaz

gingaz wrote:

Any naughty daemon on this list?

A good number of them are. In fact, it is easier to talk about what to keep than what to remove. Keep the following:

Adobe

Google

Oracle

BareBones

and get rid of the rest. That should improve things substantially. Then, for the other items, identify the ones that you really need, make sure you have the latest version, and re-install them one-by-one.

Feb 2, 2014 11:46 PM in response to etresoft

Agreed with etresoft. There is so much cruft in your agents and daemons gingaz... I'm pretty sure that's where your problems are. If you use the software that has a launch agent and launch daemon, uninstall it, make sure that launch item is removed (remove manually if it still exists) and then reinstall that latest version. Many uninstallers don't remove these.

Rember too, the removal of launch agents and launch daemons only takes effect after you reboot.

gingaz Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 9, 2014 5:08 PM in response to gingaz

Indeed, after removing most of user-run agents and daemons my memory situaton got significantly better. Now I stays 1-2GB lower than before, making it possible to use virtualbox again! Will play around with system services, maybe I'll manage to squeeze out more.

And so my introduction to osx has begun. 🙂

Thanks a lot, much appreciated!

very poor memory management