Mavericks and memory (Ram)

Paul Williams3 wrote:

«P.S. Have a read of this you may see that 10MB of RAM free is not actually bad, compression will kick it as needed. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory»

This was a VERY helpful read. The way OS X manages, swaps, compresses and purges (i don't know if it's in that exact order) RAM on the fly helped me to understand what the Activity Monitor window is actually telling me. Having 8 GB of RAM and showing almost 8 GB of RAM being used is not necessarily bad. OS X will rid itself of unused RAM as needed to make room for your next click.

What i got from the article is, basically, keep an eye on Memory Pressure. If it's not headed towards red, OS X is managing everything fine. Nothing to be concerned with.

I hope i understood that article correctly. I'm not a technical guy, just an average Joe.

Thanx all,

Paul

Hopefully the order is purge, compress, swap 🙂

Compress is orange & red is swap (the slowest)

The memory pressure is where to look to see what is going on, the way you explain it makes it seem simple :^)

I'm glad you found it useful, Mavericks is just different to older Mac OS's.

Drew Reece wrote:

Paul Williams3 wrote:

«P.S. Have a read of this you may see that 10MB of RAM free is not actually bad, compression will kick it as needed. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory»

This was a VERY helpful read. The way OS X manages, swaps, compresses and purges (i don't know if it's in that exact order) RAM on the fly helped me to understand what the Activity Monitor window is actually telling me. Having 8 GB of RAM and showing almost 8 GB of RAM being used is not necessarily bad. OS X will rid itself of unused RAM as needed to make room for your next click.

What i got from the article is, basically, keep an eye on Memory Pressure. If it's not headed towards red, OS X is managing everything fine. Nothing to be concerned with.

I hope i understood that article correctly. I'm not a technical guy, just an average Joe.

Thanx all,

Paul

Hopefully the order is purge, compress, swap 🙂

Compress is orange & red is swap (the slowest)

The memory pressure is where to look to see what is going on, the way you explain it makes it seem simple :^)

I'm glad you found it useful, Mavericks is just different to older Mac OS's.

Oh, THAT'S right . . . purge, compress, swap! I have to keep repeating that . . . purge, compress, swap! 🙂

I read the article but i'm not very tech savvy, so remembering details is a challenge.

I read that article and suddenly the light went on and it made complete sense why Mac would do it this way.

My RAM concerns are gone!

Now if i can figure out how to show my question has been answered.

Thank you so much!

Paul

Hi All...

Well its the same for me... im running OSX 10.9 latest Update... and when using Aperture or some other "Big Tools" all my RAM is going to get inactive and my MacPro (5,1) is getting really slow... Im talking about 24 GB RAM!

It looks like, that OSX puts all "touched" Data into the RAM (inactiv) which is really stupid... i think...

So im considering to go back to SnowLeopard... If there would not be my USB3 Storage...

Nobody can explain whats going on here...

When i turn back on my Swap... it will start to Swap!! Not some MB... It swapps GB....

Thats not effectiv Memorymanaging...

cheers Einar

I just wanted to chime in. My HD died finally on my early 2008 iMac, upgraded to 8GB RAM. Apple store put in a brand new 1TB drive and installed Mavericks on it. So, it was a totally clean install. Absolutely horrible performance and a generally terrible experience! I've spent several days troubleshooting the performance issues because I cannot work on this machine anymore until it is fixed. I've written up everything I've done here:

Fixing Slow Performance on OSX 109, Mavericks

Try starting a new discussion as this one concerns purely RAM.

Cheers

Pete

Agree. Same problem as most since upgrading to 10.9.1 - spinning wheel, clogged memory and frequent restarts; thought I was back with Windows 98. I have 12GB of RAM. Looking at some of the suggestions here, I ran Actvity Monitor and found kernel_task running over 4GB, with an HP printer driver running another 4GB plus, even though the printer was not connected. Ran Memory Clean and hre printer driver backed down to 1.2GB, but then as I watched it just creeping back up again. Deleted the printer in System Preferences and reinstalled it, and everything is nearly back to normal - Mail, Safari and Outlook running (with about 30,000 emails) and nearly 9GB free RAM - and stable.

Daniel

Same problems after upgrading to 10.9.1 (was OK after the original Mavericks upgrade). I checked Activity Monitor and found a printer driver active even though the printer was not connected. Deleted and reinsatlled the printer and the RAM is stable and things working much as before the upgrade to 10.9.1.

I have same issue - on 10.9.1, have not added any software in a long time, all of a sudden in the past week I can't get anything to run on my iMac. Kernel_task at 470MB, nothing else out of range. Can't get chrome or safari to go

Daniel H2 wrote:

Agree. Same problem as most since upgrading to 10.9.1 - spinning wheel, clogged memory and frequent restarts; thought I was back with Windows 98. I have 12GB of RAM. Looking at some of the suggestions here, I ran Actvity Monitor and found kernel_task running over 4GB, with an HP printer driver running another 4GB plus, even though the printer was not connected. Ran Memory Clean and hre printer driver backed down to 1.2GB, but then as I watched it just creeping back up again. Deleted the printer in System Preferences and reinstalled it, and everything is nearly back to normal - Mail, Safari and Outlook running (with about 30,000 emails) and nearly 9GB free RAM - and stable.

Daniel

Daniel,

Somebody pointed me to this article:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory

It explains how Mavericks manages memory differently than previous Mac operating systems.

That article explained the new memory management so well i'm no longer concerned with my memory usage - it's supposed to happen the way it is happening.

Paul

I ended up buying Mountain Lion from Apple (electronic download), I won't re-install Mavericks again, no need for that. Don't care much for the new ram memory features.

Your loss. For further support use the Mountain Lion forums.

Good luck

Pete

After a lengthy reading of this thread, I've come to realize that while the compressed memory saves some people hurdles with paging in and out of swap (in some cases it's smooth) a lot of my old applications that traditionally feed off ram (and are optimized to work with hdd swap) are getting too confused and sluggish. One of them is Parallel's Desktop and, while there is a new one, I can't shell out just yet.

So in the meantime I will experiment with this:
http://superuser.com/questions/668114/disable-compressed-memory-in-mac-os-10-9-m avericks

For me, as an engineer, sometimes "Worse is better".

Okay, I've read almost all these post on the issue of Mavericks using tons of RAM and the resultant slow performance and have to add my two cents...

My MacBook Pro has 4 GB of 1600 Mhz DDR3, and a 2.5 Ghz i5 it is the mid 2012 version but is only one year old nearly to the day since I bought it. I'm running OSX 10.9.1 the latest that I know of at this time. I did a clean install by formatting the hard drive and manually bringing over my files (trying to upgrade and recover files from Time Machine created a real mess on the last MacBook I owned - lesson learned).

I have had problems with the new iWork as I had iWork 09 installed and the two do not play well together. I am sorry that I upgraded iWork, but that's another story.

My computer started acting really slow to the point of complete frustration. Just using finder to find a file was brutally slow. Even Spotlight is crippled at times. I think it is the way I use my computer; I typically have many things open and running or sometimes try to do something a bit task intensive like encode video. This style of useage is no longer practical on this machine. I noticed that Activity Monitor shows very little if any free RAM even after a fresh reboot and that any free memory is quickly consumed by a few open tabs in Safari or a few open documents etc...

Is adding 16GB of RAM the answer? I suspect it would help, but the time to put it to sleep when shutting the lid will most likely increase fourfold or more as it dumps to the HDD. That happened on my last MacBook when I increased the RAM fourfold from the stock configuration. Not too big a deal, but it does slow down the process of getting the laptop ready for travel.

At this point, the computer is usable, but I can't open as many things as I usually do and that kind of puts a big kink in the way I work. So, the only real answer is possibly get more RAM that might work, or revert back the OS to Mountain Lion which is a pain especially given the fact that the new file format of iWork cannot be read by iWork 09 without indidual conversion of each and every document (apple script might help here) which might result in some loss of formatting or who knows what else, and what about itunes and iphoto how will those respond to reverting back to Mountain Lion? Who knows. Surely, a manual pull of the data will work - I hope.

The main reason I switched to the Mac years ago was to get away from loosing time to tedious maintenance like this and to enjoy the steady speed and stability the Mac provided. I am really torn here. If I have to convert all my documents anyway, and revert the OS (which is terribly slow through online downloads) and then put all my data back in and fix any little problems that arise is it worth it to essentially go backwards?

Some of the post here are of people that already have 16GB of RAM and they are still having problems.

So, to answer the post YES, I AM HAVING PROBLEMS WITH MAVERICKS TOO. It appears to be a RAM issue that develops when trying to multitask with multiple tabs or windows or applications. I have not found an easy answer and believe that reversion back to a previous OS is probably the best solution at this time. If you need to use a computer, as I do, with many things open at once and occasionally using RAM intense procedures like encoding. I am not happy about going backwards to fix the problem, so I might actually try a different approach since I have to convert tons of stuff anyway.

If you use a couple of tabs in a browser and quit applications frequently, it is usable and will work with iCloud more efficiently, so you can sync all your devices in a more complete natural fashion - if that is of concern. I have mixed feelings about it as you can probably tell.

I just wanted to add a few more thoughts on this issue.

After sleeping on it, I've decided that I like lots of the new features and everything works great if you don't put too much strain on resources by opening too many things. Command & Tab with Command Q to quit things in the background helps keep it running smooth.

What else is there? Google, Microsoft, Linux they have their own issues.

I'm sure this will get worked out in time with updates.

Someone mentioned that they wait to use updates that aren't critical for the second iteration or so. I used to have a similar thinking but jumped on this one the moment it came out because it sounded so great. Someone's gotta try it, so the bugs can be found and fixed.

Maybe I'll get a new mobile device as the iCloud integration is much improved. Just jump right into the fire and see where it leads. I deleted iWork 09 and that has cured the iWork problem and sped things up and stabilized around that application and it's files. Embrace it and make it work or not it is all a choice.

I do wish that there had been a disclaimer that all the changes would be a bit hard to revert from, but it is nothing new and happens with most systems when there is a major change. I guess for me I'll embrace the change as I don't want to put the work into reverting backwards whilst loosing interconnectivty amongst devices.

@Davestformore,

It’s really hard to tell the factors that determine if Mavericks works correctly on a Mac, it seems.

As written before I had no problems at all after the upgrade. Encountering a few memory errors in InDesign I even re-enabled the swap file (but it turned out it is InDesign CS 6 which, when creating PDFs from complex documents, tends to break its 32-bit 4 GB memory barrier … whyever!).

At this time, with my Mac being up for more than 6 days now and usually having Mail, Safari, InDesign, Photoshop and Xojo running at the same time (plus a few apps more), the impressive reserved 1 GB swap file (I have 24 GB RAM installed) is still completely unused. From time to time free memory goes down to a few MB and then gets freed up again when it’s needed.

So one cannot say that Mavericks is a complete fail. It works perfectly, but only under certain conditions and configurations which are not analyzed yet.