Memory issues 10.9.2

Memory isn't causing your problems. Mavericks uses memory very differently than previous operating systems your memory tab looks fine. You need to look at what incompatible applications you are running. Also, remove that FreeMemory app it isn't needed with Mavericks and may not be compatible with it. Download and run etrecheck and post the report here.

When you have the problem, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above. Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first. Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough. It is never necessary or helpful to post more than about 100 lines. "The more, the better" is not the rule here.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

About memory management in OSX 10.9 Mavericks

Memory is managed differently, and more efficiently in 10.9. It is (mostly) unique in the industry, but may become trend.

Let’s start with the basics. Mechanical disk drives are very slow, with access speeds in the 10s of milliseconds and transfer rates in the 200-400 Mbps range real world. SSDs are much faster, on the order of a couple of ms access and typically 1200-3000 mbps transfer rates. RAM is much faster than either, in the nanosecond access and transfer speeds of ~8 Gbps effective (1 GHz x 8 bits/byte).

These are rough numbers for comparison purposes only.

So the goal is to keep as much in RAM as possible. But if you run out of RAM what do you do?

Traditionally you take the least used RAM and write it to a special part of the disk, in a way that you can access it most efficiently - minimizing the disk delays. This is called a swap file because you swap RAM in and out of it.

10.9 has a new trick: it compresses RAM using the main processors. Rather than swapping stuff to disk (disks are slow), it actually uses the processor to compress memory and make, for example, 1 GB of physical RAM hold as much as 1.5GB. Similar approaches are used to make MP3 files 10x smaller than the real thing - there is redundancy in data and you can take advantage of that. Apple is making the following calculation: the processors can compress way faster than the disk can swap. And its also predicting that the processors are often partly idle - waiting for swap files or disk access. So rather than swap files around, its compresses the files ***in RAM***.

Compression works,. Tests show that on average it is faster, and that 4GB (i have 4 GB RAM) acts like 5 1/2 - 6GB. Wow.

So, 10.9 will load up most of your RAM, knowing that it can compress some when it needs to. So don’t worry too much that it may look like all your RAM is taken - yea, it is, but its OK.

The measures to look at are:

1. amount compressed. Compression means it has run out of RAM and needs more. As long as compression is low this is fine. In fact this is how 10.9 uses RAM more efficiently than 10.6,7 or 8. Contrary to common wisdom, it requires LESS RAM than 10.8. The colored indicator tells you who this is going - green (good), yellow( iffy) and red (bad).

2. amount swapped. Once it cannot compress any further, or can’t do so efficiently, jot begins old-fashioned swapping. This is a major slow-down and means you would benefit from more RAM. Tiny amounts are OK.

here's an article by Apple - but on th pre-10.9 memory management techniques....mostly still true, but read on.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US

Bottom line - compression makes 10.9 use RAM more efficiently than previous OSX versions. It also makes the “ram used” indicator less meaningful, and mans you should monitor “compression” .

That said, RAM has always been one of the most cost effective upgrades possible. People spend too much on new machines and too little on more RAM.

Hope this helps,

Grant

I notice 10.9.2 uses more memory too. Just upon booting up i notice i have mostly under 11GB ram left. I used to have around 15GB of ram.