Mavericks and memory (Ram)

You should never, EVER let a conputer hard drive get completely full, EVER!

With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.

If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.

Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.

Have you emptied your Mac's Trash icon in the Dock?

If you use iPhoto, iPhoto has its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.

If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.

If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!

Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.

Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.

Other things you can do to gain space.

Once you have around 15 GBs regained, do a search, download and install OmniDisk Sweeper.

This app will help you locate files that you can move/archive and/or delete from your system.

STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!

Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.

Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.

Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.

Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.

When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.

Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.

move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.

If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.

Good Luck!

🙂

I posted several months ago about the same issue and would like to share my experience update.

MBP late 11, 8GB. I had the same low performance/low free RAM after upgrading to Mavericks. I finally made a difficult decision by going back to Mountain Lion. In short, it was a painful downgrade with the help of Time Machine and several days of backing up and recovering data.

I installed with high caution a clean Mavericks (not upgrade) again with the help of Time Machine. I've been using it since the beginning of the month and yes the whole system is performing well, and it's actually a little slower than the previous version (very small difference), but I'm having no problems at all.

I learned from this was that you should know as a Mavericks user not to watch the RAM usage closely anymore and abandon any RAM clearing software, you don't need that anymore. Yes, whenever I check my 8GB RAM I usually find it 75%-99% used, but I'm not experiencing actually any problem, even while using heavy software and life is going on.

Ayham

This is what I see after computer sitting idle overnight. What does the yellow signal in memory pressure?

Followup. After closing and relaunching Chrome and Twitter app:

Tommy,

Here is a copy & paste from Apple at the address:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5890?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Start Paste: Probaly Copyrighted (from Apple Support Site) ========= >

Memory pressure is indicated by color:

Green – RAM memory resources are available.

Amber – RAM memory resources are being tasked.

Red – RAM memory resources are depleted and OS X is using the drive for memory.

Tip: If the Red state occurs, quitting apps can free up RAM. You may also be able to install more RAM to prevent memory depletion.

End Paste =========>

There is more to it of course...

Another interesting site with a bit more detail and experimentation can be found at Apple Stackexchange. The following link is of a forum where a person forces RAM to be used to see what happens with the Memory Pressure Graph. It's interesting.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107126/what-scale-or-measure-does-maver icks-memory-pressure-adhere-to

My interpretation is simple: the Memory Pressure Graph works like a standard traffic light.

Green = Go (all okay),

Yellow (amber) = Caution (RAM is getting scarce),

Red = Stop (RAM is scarce something has gotta give),

Hope you find something in here useful.

I can't believe you are having problems with 16GB of RAM.

It seems Chrome and Twitter might be RAM Hogs when left running. I recall discussions at Google about how Chrome (at one time) Leaked Memory or didn't release it as it should have of course that probably has been fixed by now.

search on my name and "memory" - i've posted a coupel pages on this abotu twenty times. I dont have the file handy.

Later

Thank you very much for your tips! tried it and my macbook is faster now, but still unlike the days of snow leopard. one thing i am not sure about is the "virtual memory" and "memory used". They seem to fluctuate a lot but the "swap used" always stay at zero.

Do you guys think there will be difference in performance if i upgrade my ram to 8GB from 4GB?

so far, figures from activity monitor seems fine, with "swap used: 0 bytes".

More RAM is always better and desirable.

Do you guys think there will be difference in performance if i upgrade my ram to 8GB from 4GB?

For me, upgrading from 4 to 8 GB solved the problem.

Read what I wrote here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5470580?start=276&tstart=0

Truth is, it depends how much RAM your usage requires. Everyone is different. Lots of apps open? Lots that use a lot of RAM? Yes. Otherewise, no. I put 8G in mine. Noticable.

I have 4G in the other

Grant

I haven't upgraded my 2013 Macbook Air ram, it still has 4gb. I am not sure whether is the Haswell processor or the SSD although it could be both , but it runs great on Mountain Lion and Mavericks. I reinstalled Mountain Lion on the Air though.

I also have a 2012 Mac Mini that came with 4gb, i7 processor and regular 5400rpm HD, I bought the 4gb model because I wanted to upgrade the ram myself and save some money, so now it has 8gb of ram and it does work way better, 4gbs were not enough when running Mavericks. I think the processor and the HD have a lot to do when it comes to performance.

I bought an electronic copy of Mountain Lion from Apple, it was around $20 I believe. If you buy ram Ebay has good sellers and prices sometimes.

Correct and reliable Mac RAM can be purchased from online Mac RAM sources Crucial memory or OWC (macsales.com).

There are only 2 or3 reliable sources for obtaining Mac compatible RAM.

Just to second this - my 13" MacBook Pro (mid 2009) was doing lots of beachballing in Mavericks with 4GB of RAM, which seemed to happen as soon as compressed memory was being used.

I upgraded to 8GB RAM & everything speeded up - except (again) if compressed memory is being used (more than a few hundred MB).

My impression is that the compression/decompression stalls the computer - though it doesn't seem to be taking very much processor, according to activity monitor. It appears when switching programs, but also when new elements of programs are loaded in (like a list of suggested spellings).

It is apparently possible to switch off compression, according to this post, but I haven't tried it.

I also have a 13" MacBook Pro from mid 2009, with 4GB of RAM, beachballing like crazy when I try to do anything at all on Mavericks, where it was just fine before that. I tried turning off memory compression, and it is now operating like it did before Mavericks. I suspect that there is some kind of issue with with memory compression on certain processors. It doesn't seem to cause such issues on our early 2009 20" iMac.

I highly recommend trying turning off memory compression if Mavericks is causing issues. I used the instructions here: http://superuser.com/questions/668114/disable-compressed-memory-in-mac-os-10-9-m avericks. You can turn memory compression back on using the instructions here: http://superuser.com/questions/701759/how-to-get-compressed-memory-back-in-os-x- 10-9-mavericks?rq=1.

I stopped having problems after I stopped worrrying about RAM.

I disabeled ll the RAM utilities I had (free memory etc..). These were causing problems even if they were Maverics versions. NOw it seems just fine!

M