rMBP + SSD and Multitasking lag

I have a Mid 2011 17" MBP with 8GB RAM and 500gb 7200rpm HD.

I always have tons of safari and chrome windows open with several XCode projects, photoshop docs etc. All this leads to lag and beach-balling. Unless there are some serious coding problems causing infinite loops etc I assume this lag is down to reading from the hard drive. i.e the system is using the swap file on the hard disk.

I am hoping this problem is gone on the rMBP as it uses an SSD which has over 20x the random read performance.

Does anyone have any experience going from MBP to rMBP in terms of heavy multitasking and lag?

nontroppo said:

Does your activity monitor show lots of page outs? You can easily ameliorate that by upgrading your RAM first of all, or installing an SSD in your MBP. I would update those first.

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Yes tons of page outs. I have 8GB RAM but OSX loves to page out even when there is lots of RAM free. eg currently 750,000 page outs a 4GB swap file and 3.25GB of Inactive RAM (and thats since restarting last night). I was hoping given OSX's tendency to do this an SSD with its fast random read/write speeds that these page outs would pass un-noticed without the usual lag or beach balling.

(When I make the leap to SSD I will go with a rMBP and get it all together. Hoping next year the upgrade price of the 768Gb will be less).

nontroppo said:

I can say my rMBP rarely lags even when several programs are running CPU/RAM demanding tasks, it is substantially faster compared to my 2010MBP (which has an SSD, "only" 8GB vs. 16GB RAM and 2 cores less of CPU).

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Good to know, although hard to make a comparison for my purposes as I mainly want to find out HD vs SSD performance in terms of swap file page out lag. (It seems you have been enjoying the benefits of SSD for a while )

nontroppo said:

I think many people IIRC who had problems with virtual memory on Lion with swapping claimed that an SSD makes swapping far less interruptive. Again, more RAM will stop swapping in the first place, while an SSD will make it less intrusive. Both together and the world is smooth

Are you still on Lion? I ask because virtual memory performance was something that was apparently improved in ML...

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I'm on Mountain Lion. I was really hoping they would stop the OS from swapping so much but after 1 day since last restart the swap file is now 10.5gb and the pageouts are at 1.8 million. Yet inactive RAM is at 3.24GB and has been all day.