Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
My question is, how much RAM is Mavericks supposed to use itself? I just installed Mavericks and, upon starting up my computer, close to 5GB of my RAM was being used. I have a total of 8GB RAM, on a late-2012 21" iMac. I find this to be odd because on Mountion Lion only about 2.5GB would be used once I booted into my computer.
This is my computer as soon as it boots up, with no programs open:
Is that to be expected from Mavericks?
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9)
alwayslikethis wrote:
My question is, how much RAM is Mavericks supposed to use itself? I just installed Mavericks and, upon starting up my computer, close to 5GB of my RAM was being used. I have a total of 8GB RAM, on a late-2012 21" iMac. I find this to be odd because on Mountion Lion only about 2.5GB would be used once I booted into my computer.
This is my computer as soon as it boots up, with no programs open:
Is that to be expected from Mavericks?
It's a tough call but from what I have seen and read OS X Mavericks handles memory much more differently than any other version of OS X released before. I too see higher memory consumption in Mavericks on my 2010 MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM but the computer does not feel any different in terms of responsiveness to OS X Mountain Lion. My take is that now the important measurement in Activity Monitor that the user needs to watch while using their Macs is the Memory Pressure chart, that I think will go higher as the system memory becomes more stressed.
According to the keynote by Apple today the amount of memory used by OS X Mavericks does not matter as much because if the OS is in a situation where RAM is running low, Mavericks will compress the memory from the unused apps to give the needy app the necessary memory and with no user interaction.
Hope this clarifies and you can learn more about OS X Mavericks new features here:
I wish my early 2011 MacBook Pro with 16 gigs with a 512 GB Sita 3 SSD you would run much faster.
Because when I was on OS X mountain lion the computer was running much faster so now every single time when I play games I only have about eight gigs free instead of the 11 that I used to have Apple it would be so nice if you guys would come up with an update to fix the priority settings so that the voice dictation wouldn't use a hold gig of ram.
Apple please send out an update so that you fix sleep and I'll location so I'm able to load games much faster. And to do a few other bug fixes
13.8% of CPU is really nothing. That can't be the explanation of why your Mac is slow.
Hi guys,
I'd like to add in to this discussion as well.
My MacBook Pro Retina has the standard 8Gb of RAM but when I have nothing open except Safari Mavericks is using 5.5GB!
That cannot be right.
MitchellsMacBook wrote:
That cannot be right.
No necessarily. In the "Memory" panel of Activity Monitor what value do you see at the bottom for "Swap Used"? If it's zero, then everything is happening in RAM. It's only if things are swapped out to disk that there's anything to worry about.
MitchellsMacBook wrote:
My MacBook Pro Retina has the standard 8Gb of RAM but when I have nothing open except Safari Mavericks is using 5.5GB!
That cannot be right.
It depends on what else is loaded, and this is a trick question. On any modern system, Mac Windows or mobile, the OS is responsible for a much wider range of background duties than 10-15 years ago. You may think you have "just one" application open, but you may not be accounting for RAM being used for performance cache pre-allocation, graphics memory for Macs with integrated graphics, networking, indexing, etc.
The true test is not how much RAM is free when nothing is running, but whether RAM is swapping to VM when lots of things are running.
As William said, as long as you aren't swapping out of RAM, there is technically no problem at all.
RAM and Mavericks?
