4gb RAM on Macbook installed - runs at 3.99gb used. How can I resolve this?

Hi g,

What apps do you have running? What does it say for page outs and swaps? What OS are you running? You may need more RAM.

gramw wrote:

I'm running Mavericks 10.9. I see from other posts that this RAM figure may be linked to Mavericks?

Yes, others have reported that.

Where do I see the page outs?

Bottom left of Activity Monitor (unless they've changed it in Mav).

gramw wrote:

For page outs - do you mean swap used?

I can't see anything referring to page outs in Activity Monitor.

Swap is one. Page outs is another. If you've selected System Memory and Swap shows, you're in the right place and they must have removed Page outs. What does it say for Swap?

gramw wrote:

For Swap, it's currently saying 0 bytes.

That's good. It means the OS isn't going looking for more RAM than you have. It sounds like you're just running at the edge of what you need.

gramw wrote:

I do think I've been seeing the spinning beachball more frequently since switching to Mavericks.

As have many others. I think the "issue" is Mav.

What does Memory Pressure show in the Memory tab of activty monitor say?

FInd the process using the memory by adding "Real memory" to the column headings and sort of the various columns. Kernel task has 2/8GB on this MacBook Pro just now. Doing lots of read/writes can use more memory as can indexing services (mds).

All of memory can be used by Safari when running Flash addin for games but this will be listed as Safari web content in the process names.

It is normal for Mavericks to use all the RAM available to it before resorting to the swapfile. This is a completely new feature designed to make optimum use of finite system resources.

If the swap used is zero your Mac is not being limited by available RAM. If the swap used is not zero, it is relying upon virtual memory to some extent, and will explain the reason for the wait cursor ("beachball"). The effect is greater on Macs using traditional hard disks and will be masked to a great extent on those with solid state storage. This does not occur until memory has been compressed to the point no more compression is possible. The memory compression algorithm itself has a negligible effect on performance.

Frequent appearance of the wait cursor and attendant slowdowns or unresponsiveness is almost certainly due to incompatible or outdated third party system modifications, ill-conceived "anti-virus" utilities, the effect of using or having used "cleanup" or "optimizing" software, or similar junk. A failing hard disk is another potential cause. To help isolate the cause consider the following.

Back up your documents and everything else important to you, not that there is any reason to believe your hard disk may be failing, but the symptoms you describe may presage an impending disk failure, and you should have backups anyway. None of what follows is intended to fix anything, but it will provide the additional information required to advance troubleshooting.

Boot OS X Recovery by holding ⌘ and r (two fingers) while you start your Mac. At the Mac OS X Utilities screen, select Disk Utility. Select your startup volume (usually named "Macintosh HD") and click the Repair Disk button. Describe any errors it reports in red.

When it finishes restart your Mac and test again for operation. If it's still not behaving as you expect it should, please post the results of EtreCheck in accordance with the following instructions:

Apple Support Communities contributor etresoft wrote a very useful app to quickly gather certain system information that may help point to a cause of this problem. Go to his website, download and run EtreCheck:

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Etrecheck will be in your Downloads folder. Open it from there. You may see the following dialog box:

Click Open - etresoft contributes to this forum frequently and can be considered a trustworthy developer.

It will take a moment to run as it collects its data.

Copy and paste its output in a reply.

Do not be concerned about anything that says "Problem" or "failed".

EtreCheck was designed to remove any personal information (such as your computer's name and serial numbers) but if you see anything that looks like an email address or any other personal information that should not be divulged to others, please delete or obscure that information when you post the reply.

When you are finished with EtreCheck, quit the program. It occupies very little space, and you can keep it or drag it to the Trash as you wish.

System performance problems for reasons that cannot be isolated to any other cause justify an SMC reset. Be sure to read the procedure carefully and follow all the steps exactly as written, even if they seem inapplicable or trivial.

Your memory usage is normal, and unless you have a functional problem, you don't need to do anything. Just use the computer and don't worry about it.

Hi,

I have a similar issue...

In my MacBook Pro, the swap is 0bytes but memory used is 3.99GB out of 4GB and the system is super slow.
I have installed Maverick in my MacBook too and there it is showing memory used is 1.99GB out of 2GB.

I am also of the opinion that the "issue" could be Maverick but the problem is the system is super slow and one buys a Mac for the performance (read speed) which is defeated with Maverick...

See John Galt's reply.