OS X Mavericks - Awful Performance

No.

Pete

mark, you might wish to check out Stack Exchange forums, if you haven't already. it's far more helpful and the contributors not so sycophantic.

Great idea!

Pete

I have an SSD as my boot drive in a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 15" laptop. In my experience, since updating to Mavericks, my display has randomly turned off and blacked out constantly. I had constant computer restarts, kernel panics, and spinning beach balls, and everything was bugging out on my computer. The CPU kept randomly going up to 100% for several seconds from time to time (perhaps compressing/decompressing RAM). All of this changed when I disabled compressed RAM through Terminal.

Here's how: http://superuser.com/questions/668114/disable-compressed-memory-in-mac-os-10-9-m avericks

vm/vm_pageout.h defines the modes for the vm_compressor boot argument, which defaults to VM_PAGER_COMPRESSOR_WITH_SWAP (per vm/vm_compressor.c). You can disable compression by changing the vm_compressor_mode argument to 1 (VM_PAGER_DEFAULT). That is:

sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=1"

Then reboot. You can verify the change was successful by running:

sysctl -a vm.compressor_mode

Since doing so, I have not had any random display/LCD issues. I thought it was something wrong with my motherboard or the SSD (I really hope it wasn't the SSD and I don't think it is now). Maybe it's Mavericks compressed RAM not working properly on SSD or whatever, but I did not have any of the issues I had before Mavericks and I don't anymore.

It might have to do with the SSD, but it's not the SSD's fault because I am not having these issues when compressed RAM is disabled, while maintaining everything else constant. I'm gonna re-enable compressed RAM and if the issues come back up, then it's definitely the compressed RAM feature/bug causing processor and display issues and overall buggy and poor performance.

To re-enable compressed RAM, either:

• remove the one boot argument from NVRAM; or
• remove all boot arguments,

  sudo nvram -d boot-args

– then restart the Mac.

Panics & crashes should be logged. It may give you an idea of things to look at. If it is a GPU panic that gives you another hint vs a CPU panic…

/Applications/Utilities/Console will show the logs, find the most recent panic/crash log & create your own thread with the relevant info. (18 pages into another issue is not the best place to ask for help).

Crashes like you describe are not normal and disabling RAM compression is not something you should need to do, so it would be prudent to look at what software you are running. There does seem to be few users of a particular model that think disabling compression is a good thing, so see if your model name finds many similar cases.

Etrecheck can help show what's installed/ running…

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

I have the logs and have taken it to the Apple Store and they have seen the logs. The kernel panics only referred to storage/IO device and upon attempting to wipe the hard drive to use it as a boot drive, the Genius determined that the hard drive was faulty/failing. The hard drive was replaced but the display blacking out still occured regardless, until I disabled compressed RAM to test.

No problems since. No software changed, everything else was kept constant otherwise. I've kept the same programs I run.

My MacBook Pro seemed to have an issue releasing compressed RAM back to the system to use. So many times I've needed more memory and my total available memory (not compressed) would be down to a few hundred megabytes but compressed RAM would be up to 2GB and even after closing all programs and opening up other ones nothing would free up (I only have 4GB total). Performance would be down until restarting it.

Basically, logs didn't show anything related to display, CPU, or GPU (according to the Apple Genius). I wish it did, because then the motherboard would need to be replaced, but it didn't.

With compressed RAM off, I haven't been FORCED to restart my computer since.

I have 10GB of RAM now so I can test re-enabling compressed RAM and see what happens.

Upon further investigation, it turns out that a large number of my customers, and myself, have experienced slowdown and degradation issues concerning Mac OS X Mavericks. It is in my honest opinion, as a Mac user of 25 years, and a Apple Salesperson, that there is an issue with the operating system concerning older machines.

I have on my own Mac mini, disabled compressed memory, but with little to no effect on performance. Within any given application, such as typing this message, watching a video, or even playing World of Warcraft (minimal settings), it appears to be okay after a while, but will experience random lag spikes (even when external hard drives are disconnected).

When switching between applications, opening new browser windows, or launching programs, everything will stall or even freeze. This was not the case in OS X Mountain Lion.

On brand new Macs, there have been lagging issues, even with our Mac Pro on display at work, that every once in a random while, we'll get a beachball cursor as the machine lags when performing a trivial task, such as launching a program or opening a new document within TextEdit or Pages. That's really concerning for Apple's highest-end Mac.

I've also experienced random lag spikes within iOS 7. I wonder if these lag issues are related. iOS is a derivative of Mac OS X.

I am concerned ultimately, as I've also found numerous internet articles on these issues.

I'll keep the forums posted if I find any information.

A disappointing upgrade to say the least. In general Apple has been disappointing me for the past year or two. I will not go beyond Mountain Lion no matter how many irritating messages I get about a free upgrade to Mavericks. 🙂

My late 2009 iMac purrs right along on Mavericks.

If you haven't installed any antivirus ware or install a lot of unnecessary "cleaning" junkware and spent the time to update all of your install working software and connected devices software, OS X Mavericks runs like a champ.

I still run OS X Snow Leopard, too and Mavericks runs almost as fast as Snow Leopard. On some applications and tasks, I find Mavericks works faster on my Mac than SL.

I think I have found the main cause of the sleep/restart issue. It's with VMware Fusion. If I close my MBP without first suspending VMware, I read somewhere that the Windows 7 installation tries to wake the system up. Since it's a virtual machine, it screws up Mavericks' sleep. I havent' had the issue since making sure VMware Fusion was closed down before putting laptop to sleep.

I am using a mid 2010 mbp and have had months worth of issues with mavericks. My computer absolutely became sluggish and nearly not worth using. As a last ditch effort...I decided to try disabling compressed RAM as you mentioned. I can confirm that this fix definitely made an enormous difference and I really am very grateful that my issue has finally(hopefully) been solved. In the meantime I hope my mac stays this fast forever...

Altron,

I am on Snow Leopard. I was going to upgrade to Mavericks, but have seen a lot of complaints about Mavericks and computers really slowing down.

Is there a simple setting in preferences or somewhere to disable compressed RAM? Or is it an involved complex operation ? I read the link on how to do it, but it seems only a programmer can do it.

Thanks in advance.

It's a simple matter of copying and pasting into Terminal. You don't need to be a programmer.

Disabling the Memory Compression in Mavericks has worked for quite awhile for me. The responsiveness has increased and memory usage has gone down.

Apple's claim that it actually makes the system more responsive just doesn't add up to me. The system having to compress and decompress takes system resources. It has to slow things down.

As for memory usage. My system with the compression turned on I could get no more than 11GB free. With the compression turned off I get 13.06GB free.

This is on a Late 2012 Mac mini with 2.3Ghz Core i7 and 16GB of memory.

The idea with memory compression is that free RAM is wasted RAM since it's unused and unutilized. I'm glad you're having a better experience with the feature off but with so much RAM total, you don't need to and the 11-13GB is just being wasted.

I upgraded my RAM to 10GB and turned compressed RAM back on. No issues. My power issues was just VMware Fusion 4, I've come to find.