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rversteegh

macrumors member
Jun 24, 2010
33
0
I believe what is happening is that an app is chewing so much memory (this is the fault of the app developers), that it is paging out the memory that was once occupied by the system... Thus resulting in a slow laggy system when it has to page back in the memory from the HDD.

VLC does this with larger files (if you don't turn off "file memory mapping").

Vuze does this too... Horrible memory management.

I believe iVolume fixed this issue that it once had.

Transmission has become a little better with memory management, it is still catching quite a bit though.

Do you know if Plex has a similar effect to VLC in this regard? My 8gb ram i5 iMac frequently hits 40mb free ram with often up to 4-5gb in inactive. It gets very sluggish and is obviously having difficulty freeing up inactive ram however I am not sure what the root cause of this is.

http://www.icoretech.org/2011/07/how-to-recover-memory-on-mac-os-x-lion-for-free/

This suggests a way to auto purge after a preset amount of time, but it feels like a workaround for a problem that should perhaps not exist. Also watching movies with the 'purge' freeze every so often isn't a pleasant experience.
 

throttlemeister

macrumors 6502a
Mar 31, 2009
550
63
Netherlands
Do you know if Plex has a similar effect to VLC in this regard? My 8gb ram i5 iMac frequently hits 40mb free ram with often up to 4-5gb in inactive. It gets very sluggish and is obviously having difficulty freeing up inactive ram however I am not sure what the root cause of this is.

http://www.icoretech.org/2011/07/how-to-recover-memory-on-mac-os-x-lion-for-free/

This suggests a way to auto purge after a preset amount of time, but it feels like a workaround for a problem that should perhaps not exist. Also watching movies with the 'purge' freeze every so often isn't a pleasant experience.
From my experience, Plex does like to use up every bit of available memory when watching a movie. It appears to fill memory as a buffer for playback. And it is rather slow to give it back, generally in excess of 15-30 minutes after you stop watching. Quitting plea generally releases the memory in about a minute. However, it does release it eventually.
 

tug

macrumors 6502
Feb 3, 2010
389
0
loughborough. u.k.
all ya got to do to get rid of inactive ram is install ifreemem, it closes inactive ram portion in memory and replaces it with free memory.

easy! :rolleyes:
 

Corrosive vinyl

macrumors 6502
Sep 22, 2006
473
0
go to the app store and download FreeMemory... a free app, which is ranked #7 in free apps.

I only use this when running huge RAM sucking games.
 

Chase R

macrumors 65816
May 8, 2008
1,279
81
PDX
Apple needs to make it easy for developers (heck, maybe they do) to disable apps from catching certain data. Yes, catching the program itself is very useful, but catching every bit of a 1080p movie is useless.

Transmission used to have this problem, but the devs figured out a fix for it. Vuze still catches every bit of data it reads and eventually turns your Mac into a turtle. VLC, Plex, and Handbrake seem to have the same issue as well.
 

sammich

macrumors 601
Sep 26, 2006
4,305
268
Sarcasmville.
Transmission used to have this problem, but the devs figured out a fix for it. Vuze still catches every bit of data it reads and eventually turns your Mac into a turtle. VLC, Plex, and Handbrake seem to have the same issue as well.

I don't think you're quite explaining yourself right. If that were really the case, then I apparently have hundreds of GB of RAM.
 

donutbagel

macrumors 6502a
Jun 9, 2013
932
1
Honestly, you don't need to worry about the inactive RAM. OS X handles memory much better than Windows.

That's not saying much :p
Mac OS X makes mistakes sometimes. VMWare Fusion rarely causes my inactive RAM to take over the free RAM, and the computer lags like a dead whale until I purge in Terminal. Then it's fine. Inactive RAM otherwise works fine, but there's some issue with VMWare Fusion.

My friend actually ran into a rare case just now when he just had Safari and stuff open, and his inactive RAM was huge and slowing his computer down. It's OK now.

----------

I don't think this can be stressed enough. It is SUPPOSED to be that way. OS X does a very good job of managing memory to optimize performance.

It sometimes fails terribly under specific conditions. It's happened to me a few times. Inactive RAM taking up gigabytes, 10MB of free RAM, and the computer almost freezes up totally. That's not optimizing performance. Then I remove that optimization temporarily with purge, and it's 1000X more responsive.

----------

Isn't it more likely that

1) Parallels, in one or more specific configurations, has a serious issue with OSX memory management, and
2) Virtually every other OSX program does not?

Agreed, and throw in VMWare Fusion with that.
 

turtlecroc

macrumors newbie
Aug 17, 2016
1
0
Great thread... 12 years and still going. But I have to echo the OP that OSX 10.4's memory management is crap. It works fine most of the time, but periodically fails catastrophically. I still have a 1.8 GHz G4 with 2 GB RAM, and I keep a 300 MB RAMdisk active at all times, e.g. for temp stuff, downloads, unzipping, etc. But occasionally, OSX will swap part or all of my RAMdisk to the hard drive--even though there are many hundreds of MB of inactive RAM. This should NEVER, EVER happen under any circumstances (i.e. a RAMdisk getting swapped to VM). Hence, OSX is only marginally functional crap.

Btw macrumors, please revert your javascript. TenFourFox (a Firefox port for OSX 10.4/10.5) grabbed 600 MB just to load your webpage. Nor did the captcha ever appear, etc. Nobody's impressed by stuff like that. (and the same thing happened on my Core i5 running Win7) Thanx.
 

Kallestar

macrumors newbie
Aug 18, 2016
1
0
Ha - might as well join in :)

Up until 10.10, this was a serious issue with OS X.

Basically, in theory when more memory was needed, the kernel should have freed "inactive" and made it available to any applications which wanted it (as they were being used whereas closed applications still in "inactive" memory aren't as important). But in practice, this rarely happened, and instead the kernel would start paging "active" memory to disk (which is very slow) causing vm memory usage to grow in order to provide memory to the application that wanted it.

You could very easily see this by plotting active, inactive, free, wired and Vu memory on a graph over time: if the OS X kernel had worked as it should have, when active memory increased, inactive should have gone down to compensate, as OS X should be freeing it to give it to active running applications. Instead inactive would often stay constant, as would free memory, but wired and Vu (paged VM memory) would increase.

Apple fixed this in 10.10.
 

Phil in ocala

Suspended
Jul 14, 2016
728
328
This really just doesn't justify a response, but let's go over this again. This is by DESIGN, unused memory (cleared / closed program) is left in your RAM and effectively the same of free RAM, it can be freely used by any program and incurs no speed hit (in fact it improves speed since when you relaunch something which already exists in inactive, there's not as much load incurred).

The reason that parallels is slow is because it's a piece of crap.
.............................. this user needs to be real and up the ram to 16GB...just do it.
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,541
942
Hate to urinate on your chips, but not that many Macs back in 2007 could support 16GB RAM.
Agreed. Make that zero. Maximum RAM on all 2007 MBPs was 6GB. In fact, the only 2007 Mac model that supported 16GB or more was the Mac Pro.
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,955
509
Inside
Agreed. Make that zero. Maximum RAM on all 2007 MBPs was 6GB.

The 2006 and 2007 Mac Pro and Xserve can support at least 16GB and up to 64GB, depending on the configuration. That makes two 2007 era Macs that can support 16GB of memory.

This is also a very old thread.
 
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