Mountain Lion Memory - is it improved in management?

RoelJuun said:

Wirelessly posted



You do realize that it's ridiculous to need at least > 4 gigs of ram for basic functionality?? And Apple still sells computers with 2 gigs of ram and a 5400 rpm disk..

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Well, I know it is, but I don't plan on switching to Windows and Snow Leopard is taking it's toll so I had to upgrade to ML...plus, 8 GB is starting to become the norm now (especially in non-SSD computers). SSD computers don't need so much RAM because the flash storage is so fast that swapping is barely noticeable, although you don't really want to waste read/write cycles.

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nuckinfutz said:

It is ridiculous. Lucky we don't need 4 GB of RAM for Mountain Lion. Of course it is recommended but not necessary.

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You don't, but like I said it's not gonna be a pleasant experience. Adding RAM is like a breath of fresh air. My Mac is 3 years old and this was the cheapest upgrade I could do, and I figured 'why not'? The processor is fine, I don't need AirPlay, the only thing that was bothering me were the page outs. That, or get an SSD, although it's more expensive.

iOrbit said:

when i use lion, (8Gb of ram) i regularly have to free memory myself. if i do not, then inactive memory builds, pageouts build, virtual memory increases, all while 'free memory' dwindles down to less than 100mb, the system will not think to free memory, it only free's memory when i quit the whole application. (closing tabs/windows, etc does not seem to free it)

this is a terrible experience on normal hdd's, has anyone noticed a difference on mountain lion , particularly people not using ssd drives?

pleas, this is very important for me, as i'v been considering reverting to windows

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Are you using iMessage? Because it has a TERRIBLE bug that eats up all RAM as well as the boot disk's free space with swap files.

BRLawyer said:

Are you using iMessage? Because it has a TERRIBLE bug that eats up all RAM as well as the boot disk's free space with swap files.

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On ML? I have NEVER, never from testing it from the first DP, had that problem. The only problem that existed (not anymore) was the notifications persisting even if you had read the message, which caused the badge to always show up in the Dock.

bitsoda said:

I own an early 2011 MacBook Pro running 10.7.4 and this thing performs like a walrus on a tar floor. If I don't restart the machine at least twice a day, the machine is rendered unusable. Something as simple as opening a new tab in Chrome will bring about the ******** beachball for a good ~10 seconds before I can do anything else.

Originally, I thought my problem was related to the fact that I upgraded from SL to Lion. But after a clean install, the problem persists. Right now I have about 900 MB of inactive memory and my swap is 800 MB. I only open Activity Monitor once I notice sluggish performance to confirm my suspicions of pure failure to manage memory by the OS. Snow Leopard -- or any OS I've used in the past decade -- never behaved like this.

I'm not sure what to do. Running iTunes, Chrome (with ~15 tabs), Dictionary, Transmission, Spotify, Terminal, and SublimeText 2 is ostensibly too much for my MacBook Pro to handle. I'm at my wit's end with Lion, and nobody has been able to offer a solution.

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How much memory do you have? I own an early 2011 MBP as well, I've been running nothing else than Lion (well now I have ML) and YES, I felt much better once I've upgraded the RAM to 16 GB.
Paging was not solved in the best way obviously, BUT:

• Chrome is not the most memory-efficient browser I think. Try to run the apps in 32-bit mode, they eat much less memory.
• You don't have to restart the memory to simulate cold-start of disk cache; run 'purge' command to basically flush all the memory caches -- if you need to

I occasionaly had to purge the memory to prevent any unnecessary page-outs (with very expensive initial creation of page files) when I had 8GBs. But I've been using JEE version of Eclipse with several plugins, Mail, Safari with quite a lot of tabs, iTerm and a bunch of other apps (Sublime Text 2 among others).

With modern SSD-based systems this really isn't a very big issue anymore (although it still IS an issue) -- my gf has a MBA (late 2010, 2 GB memory), running Lion on it with 20+ Chrome tabs and only has some problems when editing some bigger files in MS Office simultaneously. For her it is just 2-3s when she feels like computer is stuck (starting to page-out), but nothing critical.

But generally I agree that such thing like OS memory management, should be written the most efficient way possible.

Paradoxally said:

ML is definitely better. Look at my MB Pro 13" mid-2009, I just upgraded to 8 GB last week because 4 was just not enough for anything after SL, and opened a ton of apps just to check how memory was doing.

It's pretty amazing.

[url=http://i.imgur.com/ysefRl.png]Image[/URL]

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There is, it's called Mountain Lion. You can get it tomorrow (most likely). Be sure to have 8 GB of RAM (as I said before, 4 GB is not enough for anything above SL because you'll page out a lot).

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Huh? You double your RAM and say that ML is the reason why it's "much better" afterwards? What you show in Act Mon would be practically the same if not better under SL...the improvement there is because of more RAM, not because of ML...

BRLawyer said:

Huh? You double your RAM and say that ML is the reason why it's "much better" afterwards? What you show in Act Mon would be practically the same if not better under SL...the improvement there is because of more RAM, not because of ML...

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No, because I did the same test under Lion and it paged out...I couldn't test with SL but it always worked well with 4 GB RAM so that's not an issue.

It's a known fact that ML has improved memory management overall.

I was in the group that was experiencing memory management issues since Snow Leopard.

I am actually pretty happy to report that I've got nearly 7 straight days of uptime on ML and I have 0 page outs for that entire time. In either SL or Lion, that would have been impossible to match. Typically I was rebooting every 2-3 days as beachballing associated with pageouts would be a very normal thing after that amount of time.

Once I decide to see how long I could stand the behavior and it was only 5 days before my usage pattern (nothing outlandish) caused more pageouts than page ins with extremely frequent and long instances of beachballing.

During the SL/Lion timeframe, those of us having these memory issues were lectured time and time again about how we just didn't understand how this worked, inactive memory is free memory, etc etc. There are still a few people I'd like to flog over this, but whatever.

Bottom line, it was a real issue for at least some subset of users, and I'd say it's been addressed at this point.

Yeah, unfortunately I do still see some complaints about inappropriate pageout activity on ML, so it's not fixed for everyone, but at least for my app usage patterns, I'm in pretty good shape now.

Just so everyone is clear on what the issue was for me, on a 8 gig Mac, I'd have 2G wired, 2G active and 4G inactive - and I'd get massive swapping activity.

mousersvk said:

How much memory do you have? I own an early 2011 MBP as well, I've been running nothing else than Lion (well now I have ML) and YES, I felt much better once I've upgraded the RAM to 16 GB.
Paging was not solved in the best way obviously, BUT:

• Chrome is not the most memory-efficient browser I think. Try to run the apps in 32-bit mode, they eat much less memory.
• You don't have to restart the memory to simulate cold-start of disk cache; run 'purge' command to basically flush all the memory caches -- if you need to

I occasionaly had to purge the memory to prevent any unnecessary page-outs (with very expensive initial creation of page files) when I had 8GBs. But I've been using JEE version of Eclipse with several plugins, Mail, Safari with quite a lot of tabs, iTerm and a bunch of other apps (Sublime Text 2 among others).

With modern SSD-based systems this really isn't a very big issue anymore (although it still IS an issue) -- my gf has a MBA (late 2010, 2 GB memory), running Lion on it with 20+ Chrome tabs and only has some problems when editing some bigger files in MS Office simultaneously. For her it is just 2-3s when she feels like computer is stuck (starting to page-out), but nothing critical.

But generally I agree that such thing like OS memory management, should be written the most efficient way possible.

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I just bit the bullet -- a very nominal bullet I must admit -- and shelled out the $40 for an 8GB memory kit for my MB Pro. It now runs Mountain Lion great with no complaints. Hell, it even runs Counter-Strike: GO remarkably well with its Intel HD 3000. I get about 60 FPS at native resolution with settings at medium.

My experience with both 10.7 and 10.8

I'm no coder, reporting from a user perspective. In my MBP early 2011 with 16GB with 10.7.4, after 7+ days of uptime, I used to see inactive memory grow to a point where heavy swapping was needed and the system grew slower, which required me to use the purge command. As far as I can tell, it was not the system using the available memory efficiently, it was simply wasting it. And no, I don't care at all for memory stats as far as the system runs smoothly without eating GBs from my albeit small SSD.

BTW my wife's 2011 MB Air with 4GB seemed to handle memory and swapping much more efficiently even with 10.7.4.

Since 10.8 the OS seems to reclaim inactive memory more efficiently, which allows me to launch RAM-heavy apps such as VMWare Fusion after 10+ days of uptime with no swapping whatsoever.

Maybe I'm being a bit simplistic, but a computer with 16GB RAM doing nothing but normal stuff and a bit of virtualization once in a while, shouldn't be swapping at all, especially if you consider that the manufacturer of that system keeps selling computers with 4GB stock (2GB until 2011 for some models).

I thought by adding more RAM, I'd have less beach-balling, but so far that's not my experience. Using a mid-2011 iMac with 12GB and OSX 10.8.1.

Attaching a screenshot of Activity Monitor. It's in Finnish but hopefully you can still see what's what.

Running apps: Finder (a few open windows), Firefox, Mail, VLC, iTunes, Vuze, Twitter, Activity Monitor, Evernote.

Are these figures normal? Especially confused by the 30 GB of page-outs.

Unhyper said:

I thought by adding more RAM, I'd have less beach-balling, but so far that's not my experience. Using a mid-2011 iMac with 12GB and OSX 10.8.1.

Attaching a screenshot of Activity Monitor. It's in Finnish but hopefully you can still see what's what.

Running apps: Finder (a few open windows), Firefox, Mail, VLC, iTunes, Vuze, Twitter, Activity Monitor, Evernote.

Are these figures normal? Especially confused by the 30 GB of page-outs.

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After a long usage of programs (launching, exiting) -- these figures could quite possibly be normal for OS X memory management behaviour. In fact, currently I have 7GBs of inactive memory and 2.4GBs of free memory.

The quite important number is "Swap used", which in your case is <70MBs. In case you run an application that needs some more free RAM and is not in your memory, this will cause a clean-up of inactive memory (a page-out) and possibly may cause some delays.

The other important factor is: are the page-ins / page-outs frequent? In your case probably not (0 bytes / sec), but these numbers always change and when there's nothing going on, they'll be 0. If you feel "threatened" by the low amount of currently free memory, simply run "sudo purge" and wait a moment.

You might want to check these links for more technical details:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4288/what-does-it-mean-if-i-have-lots-of-inactive-memory-at-the-end-of-a-work-day
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html

iOrbit said:

however, in general, i am not seeing page outs happen the way it would by just using the system generally on lion.

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My problem was with Lion that the "kernel task" took up a lot of memory after I did some intensive work (running vmware, stacking software, adobe stuff, etc.). Problems occurred not couple of hours after the last boot but after a week or so having not booted the Macbook. After a week "kernel task" took up almost 1 GB of RAM. No wonder other memory intensive apps have been swapped out.

You should do your tests again after 1 or 2 weeks of uptime and see what it looks like.

I am sorry to hear you guys are experiencing these problems.

Just to state I have a 2011MBP 13" with 16GB RAM connected to a 24" monitor I regurlarly use a Windows 8 and also a Windows XP VM while coding in Visual Studio 2012 (XP is for testiing apps running without extra DLL's installed).

While doing this I often have a movie open and multiple Chrome windows and mail, the macbook never seems to slow down or experience issues, heck I even left the VM running and started playing Diablo 3 and didn't experience any issues (movie, browsers and Diablo wasn't launched in the VM environment).

Could there be something internally wrong with your setups causing the issues? Or even permission related? I am using SSD's rather than traditional HDD so this may help with speed but never experienced an issue or performance issue.

I have also played Lord Of The Rings Online through the VM and this ran well and looked good.

VinegarTasters said:

Finally someone posts something worthy of mention.
Look at the link:

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1204215-SU-LLVMCLANG23

Smallpt v1.0 (3D graphical display)
400% slower.

John The Ripper v1.7.9 (Blowfish algorithm)
400% slower.

Why is Clang close to 400% slower in both cases?

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Because some of these benchmarks support multi-threading and use OpenMP, which currently is supported natively by gcc but not by Clang. Once OpenMP support is added to Clang, a performance gap close to 4 will disappear on quad-core machines and so on. Note that you can STILL write multi-threaded applications to compile under Clang, but you must write specific code.

You seem not to understand that in LLVM, VM is not a Virtual Machine in the sense that it is emulated (even though you CAN compiler to byte code and use a JIT - or a flash recompilation - but this is not currently done in Apples x86 an ARM software). It is called a "VM" because the compiler has a kind of intermediate "virtual machine" that preserves a lot of semantics about the types and objects, permitting some optimizations that traditional compilers cannot perform. On the other hand, compilers like gcc exploit some architecture-specific aspects earlier during the compilation process, permitting other optimizations. It is a trade off, and in fact some hybrid compilers (like dragonegg) can combine some of both approaches.

Roberto