Mavericks and memory (Ram)

fentonwinmill wrote:

My observasions regarging this problem.

Thank you! Finally a well thought-out analysis of the issues involved. I never considered that SSD's would make any difference. I hope you communicate some of your thoughts to Apple Engineering. Probably the best way for normal users would probably be to joint the OS X Mavericks Beta program and use their Feedback mechanism.

I'm sorry to jump in here, but I have read the first 3 pages of posts, and the last 2.

On my MacBook pro, I am running Mavericks and have 4GB memory. I am reading the stuff about checking the SWAP memory. is 294MB too high? If so, what do I do about it?

No.

294 MBs worth of Page Outs isn't a lot to worry about.

I does indicate,though, that you have barely enough RAM installed.

I would statrt to worry if the Page Out amounts get to 1 GB and higher in size.

That would be the time to consider installing more RAM.

WIthout knowing your year and model MBP, no one can tell you what the max. amount of RAM your Mac will take.

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

Well, I have finally officially given up on my Mac. I bought a new PC. I will keep my Mac and use it 10 minutes at a time before it freezes because of full memory. But right now it is useless to me. I am sad.

Then sell it if you won't fix it.

Thank you so much for your response MichelPM.

My Macbook Pro is around 3 years old. When I click "About this Mac", it says the following:

13inch late 2011

Processor: 2,8GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 4GB 1333 Mhz DDr3

Software: OS X 10.9.2 (13c1021)

I hope this helps?

Why didn't you just install Windows on the Mac via boot camp?

You would have saved a lot of money. Also once Mavericks is fixed you could have updated.

I Don't think nk this is a hardware problem

You can install up to 16 GBs of RAM into your year and model MBP.

Good Luck!

The thing is I''ve seen a Gig of swap used with 16gb of memory on board with very little running.

File cache allocation is far too aggressive forcing you into a swap situation which hammers the boot disk. If you have and sad/fusion drive it saturated the bus. The new memory management makes for an unbalanced system.

You'd never see and enterprise server set up like this.

Disable the swap file like I have been doing for years. It gives the same benefits of keeping everything in the memory and with Maverick you get memory compression on top of it. The memory utilization may appear high but I see no negative effect of it so far. With 16gb I never seem to have any problems

Awesome. Thanks so much! Will go grab some on the weekend 🙂

I have never experienced this with OS X Mavericks.

Memory Page Outs are still an indicator of insufficient, physically installed RAM.

Mavericks handles memory different from previous OS X versions.

Mavericks does not let free, unused RAM go to waste or stay dormant in the system any longer.

If there are few apps running under Mavericks, Mavericks will grab all of the remaining RAM for itself, but will start dole-ing out that RAM when more applications launch or when an Application needs more during operation.

This is different from the old way RAM allocation used to work under older versions of OS X.

That is leaving unused RAM alone until needed.

I think the reason Mavericks deals with the free, unused RAM situation differently is because it takes all of the excess, unused RAM as part of the new memory compression routines in Mavericks.

I think the problem is not enough memory is being left free for compression and managment so it uses swap. With a fast disk the SATA channel is saturated causing temporary freezes.

In theory the new memory management seems logical but completely tuned enough. I'd like to see some some parameter to set a %free memory.

Open Activity Monitor and take a screenshot of the Memory Page.

Post it here.

Τhis my memory screenshot. Pressure is not high but memory usage is 15,99 GB from 16 GB !!! I have to worry about it ?