Q: Mavericks and memory (Ram)

Yes, but there are people monitoring the Discussions, they are willing to say all is well when it's not. I'm having memory issue with my iMac and I've reinstalled Mavericks 4x. So yeah there is a problems with the Memory Management. Someone added their 2 cents of dribble and it went no where. Even as I write this it's tell me that I have 850 mb and Safari is the only thing running from a cool boot. 

I apologize on behalf of all of us that enjoy Apple products. It's a shame you try to get assistance regarding an issue or issues that you'll experiencing from your beloved product, then you get that one; that jerk that leaves you regretting coming forward with your problem(s). I'm glad professionals don't do this. Even on sites that have a Microsoft discussion you won't find this kind of internal customer badgering. I do hope those of us with real system issues get a fix for memory and performance related issues. We can't do anything for the lame representation that's found here targeting people needing help. But we are optimistic that Apple will acknowledge the complains and invest in the research to have these software related hiccups addressed. Learning from people like us is how Apple thrived for so many years. One or more hurtful remarks should not be the normal mannerism for attention from misguided morons attempts to silence the many.

I also have the same issue with an 8GB of RAM on a MBP late 2011.

To add to those came before me, I monitor my RAM with a little preference extesion called "Menu Meters", it always shows after using my Mac for around an hour that whatever unused RAM volume is blocked as inactive, resulting that my whole RAM to be occupied and the whole system goes too slow and freezing for several seconds every now and then, but doesn't crash.

I used to watch that "inactive" thing on previous OS X versions and it never filled my memory like what is happing on Mavericks.

I agree. I had a Mac for 7 years which worked great until the hard drive tanked. I went out and bought another mac the next day last summer. I have never had issues until I installed mavericks. The system reminds me of a corrupted Winows XT system. I get web pages that only load the 1st screen and when I scroll down there's nothing. If I leave it for a few minutes it usually paints. I have tried many of the suggestions in the various threads about this aside from a clean install. One 'fix' that has helped marginally is the free app called 'Memory Clean'. Apps such as Pages are OK once they're open. I don't leave browsers open as I did before - just use Safari (not Chrome or Firefox) or Mail if I'm not using it. I keep the dock clean at all times with only 1 or 2 applications open at any given time.

Just saying that this is a huge difference from Mountain Lion. I hope the braintrust at Apple come up with some solid suggestions soon.

I started getting this run out of application memory thing too after I upgraded to mavericks. I get it even with no apps open. I get force quit coming up with only finder in it.  I can't even load system preferences.  Any way to uninstall mavericks or get this to stop my computer is unuseable.  I'm on a mid 2010 27" iMac. 

There is no way to uninstall Mavericks. I think the question is whether you can download and install 10.8 and I'm not entirely sure about that. I -think- that you can contact apple and get 10.8 on a flash drive or something but it may require a call to Apple. Searching the App store for 10.8 or Mountain Lion results in nothing. 

   a little more sleuthing turned up a link that explains how to buy Mtn Lion. I think you'll have to go through some interesting hassles like getting it installed on a USB stick to be able to boot from that...or install it on an external drive, then boot from that and wipe your internal drive (after backup) and install on that. I would not attempt to install Mtn Lion over Mavericks.

  http://www.gottabemobile.com/2013/10/25/os-x-lion-mountain-lion-still-available- purchase/

I see that there are a lot more "tech savy" people on this thread reporting the sluggish issues. I suggest we discuss this among ourselves and try to find the root cause of it without fanboyism or anti-fanboyism.

I understand this a community forums and those people are trying to help but they are just applying the "it worked for me so it should work for you. If it doesn't its your fault." logic.

I'm experiencing the same sluggish performance issues you guys are having. I have only 4GB of ram but _no_swap_at_all_ since Safari, Terminal and iTunes is basically everything I use. Poeple seem confused and point that I don't have enough memory but Mavericks requires at least 2GB. Memory pressure is around 30% or less.

I was always taught that a good OS will always use 100% of its RAM for cache. Unless Mavericks is that different from other Unix-like systems of course.

The disk I/O is also fine and SMART status is ok. Some people even suggested that I need an SSD to run Mavericks!

Another thing is that my computer has a very fresh clean install and absolutely no third party manually installed aside from those that come from the App Store. Not even Flash, MS Office, Java or X11. Nothing with the exception of Etrecheck and MPlayerX.

For starters let me post the Etrecheck Results. UNKNOWN is the Login item that mounts the shared home folder on Active Directory environment.

Hardware Information:

          MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2011)

          MacBook Pro - model: MacBookPro8,1

          1 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 2 cores

          4 GB RAM

Video Information:

          Intel HD Graphics 3000 - VRAM: 384 MB

Audio Plug-ins:

          BluetoothAudioPlugIn: Version: 1.0

          AirPlay: Version: 1.9

          AppleAVBAudio: Version: 2.0.0

          iSightAudio: Version: 7.7.3

System Software:

          OS X 10.9 (13A603) - Uptime: 0 days 16:54:33

Disk Information:

          TOSHIBA MK5065GSXF disk0 : (500.11 GB)

                    EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    Macintosh HD (disk0s2) /: 499.25 GB (423.95 GB free)

                    Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB

          HL-DT-ST DVDRW  GS31N 

USB Information:

          Apple Inc. FaceTime HD Camera (Built-in)

          Apple Inc. Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad

          Apple Inc. BRCM2070 Hub

                    Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller

          Apple Computer, Inc. IR Receiver

FireWire Information:

Thunderbolt Information:

          Apple Inc. thunderbolt_bus

Kernel Extensions:

Problem System Launch Daemons:

Problem System Launch Agents:

Launch Daemons:

Launch Agents:

User Launch Agents:

User Login Items:

          UNKNOWN

          iTunesHelper

3rd Party Preference Panes:

          None

Internet Plug-ins:

          Default Browser.plugin

          QuickTime Plugin.plugin

User Internet Plug-ins:

Bad Fonts:

          None

Time Machine:

          Mobile backups: ON

          Auto backup: YES

          Volumes being backed up:

                    Macintosh HD: Disk size: 499.25 GB Disk used: 75.3 GB

          Destinations:

                    bkp [Network] (Last used)

                    Total size: 536.53 GB

                    Total number of backups: 19

                    Oldest backup: 2013-10-30 22:40:51 +0000

                    Last backup: 2013-11-04 14:02:23 +0000

                    Size of backup disk: Adequate

                              Backup size 536.53 GB > (Disk used 75.3 GB X 3)

Top Processes by CPU:

               4%          automount

               3%          WindowServer

               2%          diskimages-helper

               1%          coreservicesd

               1%          umount

               1%          EtreCheck

               0%          mds_stores

               0%          SystemUIServer

               0%          diskarbitrationd

               0%          hidd

Top Processes by Memory:

          184 MB             Safari

          106 MB             softwareupdated

          106 MB             iTunes

          74 MB              WindowServer

          66 MB              com.apple.WebKit.WebContent

          66 MB              Mail

          53 MB              MPlayerX

          49 MB              Terminal

          49 MB              Preview

          41 MB              Finder

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.

What's interesting in my situation is that now all of my applications work under Mavericks, but everything works slowly. Whereas I had a lot of issues with Mountain lion, I have none of those issues under Mavericks except for the speed. So I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. I love that my applications work, but I hate that they are so sluggish. The only problem child that I have is Photoshop CS6, and that's only when I try to edit a photo through iPhoto. Otherwise everything works perfectly but slowly. I have a late 2009 iMac, four gigs of memory. Several external hard drives which now miraculously all appear at the same time on my desktop, which never happened before.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Have got few basic apps running, but look at the memory pressure.

Restarted my computer and it is still the same.

I experienced different changes to most of you: On my Power Mac early 2009, Mavericks clearly is the best OS that has run on it so far. The computer is extremely responsive, fast and more than 10 degrees cooler than before, and the self-built 3,25 TB Fusion Drive completes the boot progress in about 10 seconds now. PhotoShop comes alive after 3 seconds, and system prefs are instantaneously displayed. Even the Creative Suite 6 that used to slow down after less than 1 hour of switching around between InDesign and Acrobat (and sometimes Photoshop and/or Illustrator) works faster now, the need for frequent application restarts has gone.

One thing I’m still not sure about: I disabled virtual/swap memory after installing OS X 10.8 and upgrading my Mac with 24 GB RAM. Mavericks inherited that setting, and I could not find any problems yet. From time to time free memory goes down to less than 500 MB, and then the inactive RAM gets freed up instantenously, leaving me with more than half the installed RAM being free.

Anyone knows if there are some drawbacks with this? Should I re-enable virtual RAM or could the computer slow down again from a much too greedy swap disk size?

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Have got few basic apps running, but look at the memory pressure.

What do you see wrong with a small green bar, taking up maybe 20% of the available space.

Running a Macbook Pro mid-2009, with 4GB RAM.  It has never...ever run as poorly as it does now.  Upgrading to Mavericks has ruined my machine, continuos stalling, software that takes an age to load.  Mail / Exchange is lagging up to 10 minutes behind iPhone & iPad mail delivery.

It's a disaster.  I read all these comments about how it manages RAM better, but yet I am definitely, 100% not seeing this.

I should not be surprised.  I have been a loyal Apple user for 10 years, and every time they release new software, it hastens the death of older devices which were running fine before.

@Barney-15E: It is not a small green bar at all. If you look at it, there is no more space left.

@ouksal: Unless there is a display setting I haven’t found yet, it *is* a graph showing about 20%. Activity Monitor shows the seleted activity graph over time, so this green bar means you had about 1 fifth memory pressure during the last minutes while Activity Monitor was running. Restart the Monitor and see if the bar fills up from right to left.