Mavericks and memory (Ram)

@UliB: Mavericks clearly is the worst OS so far. How do you interpret physical-memory: 4GB, but 3.4GB is being used on my attachment (previous post)? I didn't have this problem before the upgrade. All my apps either run slower or not responding now.

Guys its true. I'll add to the chorus that the current state of Mavericks doesn't work decently with 4GB memory. I've upgraded today to 16GB memory and all the problems vanished. No beachballing, no iTunes interruptions and very smooth performance.

I was planning to max memory anyway. This issue kinda forced my hand. Still is kinda ugly than an OS needs that much memory to work. There has to be some software issue.

Barney-15E wrote:

Virtual Memory Statistics:

166 MB Free RAM

1.41 GB Active RAM

1.17 GB Inactive RAM

984 MB Wired RAM

2.00 GB Page-ins

29 MB Page-outs

Anyway before appearing that I want to hijack the thread or something... I think the answer should be in the logs somewhere. For example, everytime I get an iTunes sound hiccup I see lots of errors related to "usbmuxd" related failures.

It is very odd that you have any Page-outs at all when not running anything. If that is common, then I would think 4GB just isn't enough, or they need to readjust their memory management.

I guess swap happens. Some programs write to swap even when there is memory available. In any case every site or blog I've visited gave the information that Page outs should never exceed 10% of the physical memory/

I'm having similar problems on my Late 2008 MBP with 4gb of ram on 10.9. At startup I'm at 3.9 gigs used. Tough to do anything without hangups. I just upgraded on my MBA, same issue. Using 7.5 gb of 8.

Help

I guess swap happens. Some programs write to swap even when there is memory available. In any case every site or blog I've visited gave the information that Page outs should never exceed 10% of the physical memory/

Yeah, I don't consider yours large, by any stretch, but your description suggests you are not using anything that would need to swap. However, if it has been running for a long time, you're probably going to have some swapping.

My late 2012 Mac is at a crawl depending what I open. I keep "Memory Clean" active and clean every 10 minutes. If it starts to crawl I reboot. Sometimes it goes down to 10mB of free memory. When I 'clean' and only have safari and mail, open it gives me about over 2 Gbytes. I'm trying to avoid an upgrade from 4 Gig of ram which is obviously not enough for mavericks. Apple needs to fix memory management so that I don't have to do it. Mountain Lion and others never gave me any issues.

@ouksal: Agreeing with you would put me into philosophical trouble, as my and your experience contradict each other’s perfectly.

Shouldn’t we rather say: While Mavericks is seen by some as the best performing OS X so far, for others it’s a clear pain in the a**?

There seem to be indications that 4 GB RAM is not sufficient for it to work. On the other hand: Have you ever tried to make it run after a secure boot or working from a clean user account? Possibility exists the memory trouble exists because of third party software, or is it still laggy then?

I am so glad that I found these postings, because I was really doubting myself. I am a newbie to Mac, finally I took a deep breath and jumped into Mac, kissed my windows 7 PC farewell.

Totally in Awww with my 27" , late 2012 iMac (8GB) with Mountain Lion installed, untill I "upgraded" to Mavericks..

aside from that fact that I am unable to sync my local outlook data, I noticed that the respons time was way slower, sometimes even freezes. This machine is now significant slower then it was with ML installed, I am contemplating to revert back to ML, but.. a bit afraid if the downgrade will run smoothly, especially because i have no mac recovery skills whatsoever.

I regret to say that I am really disappointed with Mavericks😟

I'm the guy who upgraded to 16GB memory recently.

I've just noticed my Quicktime videos are stuttering a lot. I've removed them from iPhoto and opened them directly from the file. They still stutter. Then I've placed the videos on a network file server and played them perfectly smooth.

Can someone running a standard mechanical disk try to replicate this? I'm not using disk encryption.

Thanks in advance.

PS: And stop bashing Apple. Bugs happens and I'm pretty sure they are working their ***** off to fix those problems.

Can someone running a standard mechanical disk try to replicate this? I'm not using disk encryption.

I don't have any movies in iPhoto, but the ones on my hard drive do not stutter. I have some in iTunes, and they do not stutter, either.

Is there something accessing your internal drives that might be causing that? It seems if it runs ok on a server drive, maybe something is running in the background that is fighting for access to the drive.

No stuttering here as well. Quicktime Player plays perfectly smooth with really low CPU usage.

@UliB: Mavericks is the worst OS. Quicktime, Silverlight, and Flash Player all run slow since the upgrade. You are the only one defending Mavericks. Are you an Apple employee?

@ouksal: No, I swear honestly I’m not. And I certainly do not want to intimidate you. I see you and many others are disappointed by Mavericks’ performance, and this is clearly a problem which should be solved ASAP.

I did not install Silverlight, therefore I cannot tell about its performance. The other two are running here without problems, smoothly and with really low impact on the CPU. Which is why I am hopeful your problems can be fixed soon. Maybe it’s my hardware – and old Mac Pro 2 x 2,66 GHz early 2009 with 24 GB RAM and virtual memory swap file disabled –, maybe it’s something about my configuration (albeit it’s full of extensions and helpers), but there must be some clear factor (or a combination of several factors) making this gross difference between your and my experiences.

Right now, under working conditions, CPU temp is around 40 °C. It was seldom below 60 ° under Mountain Lion. Being up 14 hours since last restart after an installation and having done a lot of Photoshop and InDesign work, 10 GB of RAM are free, 3,5 GB inactive. Has not been this way under Mountain Lion, where free RAM became a rare good after some hours. After all, Mavericks is really fun to work with. Only the new Garage Band performs worse than before on my Mac, I experience frequent visual hang-ups when playing six-track virtual instrument pieces.

But this all is not meant to contradict your words. I really do hope Apple finds the reason for your problems soon. I guess you would rather share my contentment than suffer from current conditions. Seeing that Mavericks *can* run extremely smooth strengthens my hope that there will be an easy bug fix for you.

Best
Uli

Thanks for trying it. I've suspected the disk at first. I've did the following:

1- dd'd a large file to /dev/null: around ~90MB/s reads. Should have no problem with a ~200kbp/s video.

2- dd'd 4GB from /dev/zero to disk in sync mode. I think I've got around 40-60MB/s. Writes seems good.

Then I've played the whole stuttering video. Its an old video I've took from the Shinkansen window with my iPhone 4 that stutters a lot from disk. Should be in file cache which is in memory now that I've played it right? Played it again and still stutters.

I can't even guess where is the problem now. I have freshly installed OS X without any third party, antivirus or crapware software installed, an obscene amount of memory and the disk is ok.

Its worthy mentioning that MPlayerX and Movist (which runs on top of Quicktime+ffmpeg) run those videos smootlhy.

I don't think my problem is that obvious. I'll call Apple as soon as I can to discuss about the issues.

I'm a Linux user but I bought a Macbook Pro from Ebay for Mavericks. I have 4gb RAM which is wayyyy more then enough for any Linux distro I use but with just Firefox or Safari running I'm at 3.50 gb RAM use. I also use Windows 8 and its half that with tons of stuff running. I had Lion on this at first and it ran fine. This is a dog.

I'm in a similar boat: 2008 iMac 20", 2 GB 800 MHz RAM, Intel 2.66 Core Duo 2Ghz, and OS X Mavericks is killing my system. The stalls, hangups, memory errors, etc. is unbelievable. From what I've read thus far, adding memory certainly wouldn't hurt things...but may not necessarily be the answer to my Mavericks woes, either.