Mavericks and memory (Ram)

I had posted earlier about it but here it is
http://superuser.com/questions/668114/disable-compressed-memory-in-mac-os-10-9-m avericks

Can't find a way to deactivate file caching but it's not as bothersome.

Can somebody make a RECAP.... This post is quite long and many people.. like me... are not software programmers or so..
I have this RAM issue that many people have... Even if I do nothing RAM gradually goes down until 20-30 Mb then System crashes. I bought new Ram only to have some more lifetime before crash.

Is there a standard procedure somebody can suggets to disable this new RAM ihandling n Maverics and bring us back to Snow Leopard? Can somebody summarize it step by step.. exactly what to do?

thanks, M

MarcelloM1973 wrote:

I have this RAM issue that many people have...

I'm one of those who doesn't believe most people here have a RAM issue, they just aren't aware of how it should make life better for them. By far the majority of Mavericks users do not have any RAM issues.

Even if I do nothing RAM gradually goes down until 20-30 Mb then System crashes. I bought new Ram only to have some more lifetime before crash.

Please start a new topic concerning these crashes and post a crash report. There is something else going that needs to be resolved and attempting to prevent OS X from doing it's job won't help you.

Is there a standard procedure somebody can suggets to disable this new RAM ihandling n Maverics and bring us back to Snow Leopard? Can somebody summarize it step by step.. exactly what to do?

The only thing I'm aware of would be to disable RAM Compression, which would undoubtedly make your situation worse.

I'd have to agree with MadMacs0.

19 pages deep into this issue is not the place to troubleshoot your issue, post a link to a new thread if you want people to follow from here.

I'd also agree that it sounds like you have deeper issues, something is making Mavericks fail to work. It could be hardware or software. Etrecheck could help troubleshoot the software, http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

I agree with others. Your issues sound more like a malicious prank or something very broken with the kernel (no Unix memory manager will easily allow other programs to suffocate itself). I'd suggest a clean install, but I'm also thinking that you might have a trojan (though I have yet to hear of one for Mavericks)

Well,

despite all the stories that Maverick should be more RAM efficient since it runs its Magic Memory Compression© and that "free Ram is wasted RAM", my own experience says the exact opposite. My MBP medio 2011 with 4GB of RAM was running fine until I upgraded to Mavericks. Ever since it has been painfully slow, to a point that it became almost impossible to work with. I read all the topics on "Mac with Mavericks running slow", there seems to be quite a few people having this problems.

I followed all the advices to speed up my Mac, even the ones that I knew were rubbish (like fix permissions) cause you never know. But the problem persisted.

Yesterday I replaced the 2x2GB of RAM with 2x4GB of RAM. Now eveything is working smoothly again. No more beachballs, long delays in the finder or fans blowing trying to cool down the mac.

Should have done this much earlier. It costs me only €73,- and five minutes of work.

Well worth it.

typo: my MBP is from medio 2010

Thanks for the posting.

I was considering 16GB (just in case), but the cost is a bit much for me at this time.

It is good to know that 8GB RAM will run Mavericks smoothly.

I have been encountering spinning beach ball more often too ever since i upgraded from snow leopard to mavericks on my 2010 13inch macbook pro.

Current setup:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro7,1

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 3 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP71.0039.B0B

SMC Version (system): 1.62f7

Serial Number (system): W8******ATM

Hardware UUID: 8459C883-9275-5337-A9C7-0E40A02507BA

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

so i am wondering, how do i determine if RAM upgrade will do my 2010 13inch macbook pro any good? because from what i read in many other previous posts in this thread, a high "swap used" count is a sign that RAM upgrade is necessary.

But from activity monitor,

Physical memory: 4.00GB

Memory used: 3.89GB

Virtual memory: 5.26GB (what exactly is virtual memory? it seems to fluctuate)

Swap used: 0 bytes (this is a good sign?)

App memory: 1.83GB

File cache: 563.5MB

Wired memory: 547.3MB

Compressed: 752.4MB

Yet i get way more beach balling than when i was still using snow leopard (beach ball rarely appears).

Thanks!

<Edited by Host>

It's also high page out amounts, too!

Other issues that can cause Mac performance slowdowns,

How full is your Mac's hard drive?

Do you run any antivirus software on your Mac? Antivirus software can slow down the normal operation of OS X and cause other performance issues and interfere with OS X's own security features.

Do you run any "crapware" like Mackeeper or any other type of so called hard drive "cleaning" and/or "Tune Up" style apps?

These apps are unnecessary and can have detrimental effects on a perfectly running Mac OS X and often do more harm than the "good" these types of apps portend to do.

Unimstall these apps per the instructions on the developer's website.

You may need to update all of your third party software if there are OS X Mavericks updates that can be applied. You may need to go the third party developers' websites if there are no updates through the Mac App Store.

Update all of your various Web browser Internet plugins, also.

Also, if you have any connected third party devices, like keyboards, mice, drawing tablets, hubs, card readers, audio/video interfaces, etc, you need to update the drivers for these devices to OS X Mavericks compatible versions.

Ah...page out. how do i check that?

As for hard disk, i currently have 5.83GB left out of 250GB. No hardware cleaning/antivirus crap whatsoever. No connected third part devices too. My usual activities on my MBP are just Chrome and watching videos using VLC player. That's about it.

I also noticed high memory usage from various processes called "Google Chrome Helper".

Should i pay attention to that?

TeeJhedge wrote:

As for hard disk, i currently have 5.83GB left out of 250GB.

There's your problem. You generally need 10-20% contiguous free space to hold your VM pages, so that's also why your page-outs are high. You'll need to off-load some of those videos to an external or invest in a bigger hard drive.

i see. Let's see if i can empty some stuff on my hard drive.

Thank you very much for your help!!

0 bytes of 'swap' is the 'page outs'. That looks OK, but the question is how long has the Mac been running, was it being 'slow' how much background tasks were running etc…

You should do what everyone else (who is smart enough to listen to advice) in this situation does.

Create a new thread…

• Describe your actual symptoms - What apps are slow? Are there any signs of background tasks (Time Machine, Spotlight indexing) or other things you are not telling us.
• Post an Etrecheck report, it can show what is installed & running.

10.9 doesn't seem to work well with older software, so if you upgraded via Apples installer, Migration Assistant or restored via Time Machine you could have old software that is affecting performance.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck - This was made for improving help on this forum.

If old software is a possible cause, cleaning it up is an involved process hence the need for your own thread

Post a link to your thread if you want people to follow from here.

MadMacs is right about your HD, but you don't appear to have excessive page outs. Personally I'd say you want more free disk space if this is 'spinning' disk not an SSD.

Actually it is more like 15-20 GBs mimumum of free hard disk space.

The percentage rule doesn't really apply any longer now that we have larger capacity hard drives, now.