Mavericks and memory (Ram)

***, thats not cool, the whole system slows down !!!! the last Mail fix from yesterday included

I'm stuck at Snow Leopard because I didn't fell encouraged to upgrade. Lion and ML was a step back in performance.

The thing is there is a lot of peolpe loving the new system. But others are hating... I just don't know what is happening

Snow Leopard was cool but Mavericks... I only have 4gb RAM but 1gb RAM was fine for SL. A poster said that a OS should use all its RAM but that makes no sense. None of my Linux installs ever goes above 1 and half gb of RAM use even with mutiple browser windows open. Same for Windows 8. No OS should require more then 2gb to work well. Not unless you do a lot of multitasking.

ConfusedbyLinux wrote:

A poster said that a OS should use all its RAM but that makes no sense.

It does. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. That is true for every modern operating system including Linux.

http://www.linuxatemyram.com/index.html

That memory is alocated for file system cache and its freed as soon as an application requests access to it. The true indication that your system is starving on physical memory is the heavy use of swap or "page outs".

i need the memory for my other application. why the **** mavericks (kernel_task) get 4.8GB of my 8GB ???? thats not modern !

Really? I'm using SWAP for basic tasks. That never happened with SL, Lion or ML. Two browesr windows open and its hitting SWAP. My computer on with no programs runing by me is using over 2gb RAM. I've never had a Linux distro and that includes Ubuntu or Fedora go abouve 800mg RAM on idle. I have used Mint KDE and its a memory hog and never then 800mg RAM on a 4gb system. I won't pretend to be a expert on OS X or Linux or Windows but somethings wrong when basic tasks use 4gb RAM and dig into my SWAP.

Never happens with my Linux or Windows box.

We use a product called Scannerz for HD and system testing. It comes with an app called Performance Probe to help people determine whether or not the bottlenecks they're seeing are actually drive lock ups or excessive OS or application activity. One of the nice features about it is that it displays memory, drive free space for the boot drive, and some VM parameters dynamically. Comparing Mavericks to its predecessors, here's what I've observed:

1. If you have it set as a start up app, although it doesn't start running until you click on the "Start" button, it will report initial VM parameters. Initial swap space allocated at start up on all previous OS versions was 64MB if I recall correctly, and now it's 1.1GB.
2. Once anything is running, the memory used pie chart, which is similar to that of the "old" Activity Monitor, shows nearly 2.3GB in use only after opening nothing more than "Mail" and "Safari." I'm not talking about using Safari to access an online video, I'm talking about it being used just to do this post.
3. Opening up Activity Monitor to get the details has what seems to be a memory wart hog called "com.apple.IconServicesAgent" and I swear, every time I've checked this it's showing almost 300MB of RAM in use.

This thing is using too much memory. The same thing seemed to happen in the early releases of Leopard, but they cleaned it up over time. I'm hoping this is just a characteristic of an early release. I do software development and typically if I monitor Mountain Lion I get about 1.9GB of used RAM, about 1.7GB of used RAM for Lion, and about 1.5GB of used RAM for Snow Leopard under the equivalent circumstances.

My guess, and that's what it is, is that we're seeing the effects of a very early release of the OS. A fear might be that because of Apple's growing use of SSDs they may feel inclined to abuse memory by swapping stuff out because the SSDs, along with memory compression can make stuff happen faster...if you have an SSD, that is.

I wouldn't be terribly inclined to be that critical just yet, after all this is a 10.9.0 release. With luck things will tighten down with 10.9.1....but when is that coming?

MrJavaDeveloper wrote:

We use a product called Scannerz for HD and system testing. It comes with an app called Performance Probe to help people determine whether or not the bottlenecks they're seeing are actually drive lock ups or excessive OS or application activity. One of the nice features about it is that it displays memory, drive free space for the boot drive, and some VM parameters dynamically. Comparing Mavericks to its predecessors, here's what I've observed:

You are using a tool designed for the old memory management system.

Mavericks has completely altered memory management for Mavericks. Any tool you use previously will provide bad information.

Here is some info on the Memory Compression feature: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory

berndfrombremen wrote:

i need the memory for my other application. why the **** mavericks (kernel_task) get 4.8GB of my 8GB ???? thats not modern !

I would say that there is something very wrong, but figuring out what is causing it may be difficult.

I'm running 13 apps, one is VirtualBox VM using 4GB of my 16. My kernel is only using 1.2 GB.

If you restart and don't open any apps, how much memory does kernel_task use?

If it is low, try opening apps one-at-a-time and see how the usage changes.

If it is large at startup, I would suspect some kernel extension.

I also had a problem with a process sucking up memory. It was CalendarAgent. After a "notification" of some sort, you could see it zip up the Activity Monitor going from around 20 MB to 2+ GB. As well the Kernel_Task going from around 500 or so MB to 4 or 5 GB. By selecting CalendarAgent and quiting it the Memory picture returned to normal until the next time.

I called Apple, even though my early 2009 iMac was past the Protection Plan. Evidently for each OS X upgrade they give you 90 days of support.

It took a while to go through some steps to diagnose the problem, and then about a week for them to call back. When they did we spent 30-40 minutes removing some stuff within the ~/Library and since that time it has behaved itself.

The Memory Pressure graph, which use to climb into the danger zone as soon as the CalendarAgent started expanding, has not budged from a small green strip at the bottom of it.

I would like to have remembered the steps we took to fix the problem but I don't trust that I could, so won't attempt to list them.

I did see a post with what appeared to be a simular proceedure for correcting his/her problem on one of the discussion groups in the past week.

Hope this helps some of you.

I am using MacBook Pro (2011) . When I've bought it, it had 4 gb RAM and Snow Leopard. Till the first big upgarde to Mavericks, it was working very good and fast. Now I see in my Activity Monitor that i use 3.99 gb from 4 gb, running google chrome. Last 3 days I was really wondering, thought that only i have this problem, but there many people with 8 gb and even with 16 gb of ram having this problems with slow work. Something is definately wrong!

best regards!

Hello. I grabbed this: http://download.cnet.com/Memory-Clean/3000-18512_4-75807234.html Memory Clean. Its free and seems to have helped. I wouldn't be concerned about all my RAM being used but I'm using SWAP also. Not always a lot but I never use SWAP on my Linux box or my Windows system.

I have 4 different memory clean apps on my mac, but these app don't help, the working process is still slow...

evghenii wrote:

Now I see in my Activity Monitor that i use 3.99 gb from 4 gb, running google chrome. Last 3 days I was really wondering, thought that only i have this problem, but there many people with 8 gb and even with 16 gb of ram having this problems with slow work. Something is definately wrong!

I'm afraid all that is wrong is that you don't know how to read the memory information. 10.9 will try to use ALL the available RAM this is a good thing & is normal.

evghenii wrote:

I have 4 different memory clean apps on my mac, but these app don't help, the working process is still slow...

This is probably because you keep 'cleaning the memory'!

All you are doing is deleting the information that the OS wants in RAM. The OS will simply reload that information when it is next needed. Your 'memory cleaners' are making performance worse.

Stop cleaning memory!

The only figure you need to worry about is Swap Used. Please report that figure here.

Your issues are almost certainly not RAM, you can do some proper troubleshooting if you want to resolve them, however what you have described about your RAM sounds normal so far.

Post an EtreCheck report if you want to troubleshoot…

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Or I can give you a command to make the RAM get overloaded & you can see this process in action - you will see what Activity Monitor shows & compare to your current behaviour.

Ok, but if i will say you that last 2 days i do not use this clean memory apps, and my mac is running my old 8 yars PC, it is unbelieveble SLOW!