Q: Mavericks and memory (Ram)

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.

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