is it me or is mavericks eating memory? i'm running the same applications and my tasking has not changed since the update to 10.9 however i'm finding i'm always maxing out my 8gb like it's nothing.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mavericks and RAM
- Thread starter iapplelove
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
What you should concern is Swap used. If it haven't touched Page files, your RAM is not really full then, just the way to manage RAM in Mavericks is different.
What you should concern is Swap used. If it haven't touched Page files, your RAM is not really full then, just the way to manage RAM in Mavericks is different.
Yes swaps is 0. Still getting use to the new usage layout.
What you should concern is Swap used. If it haven't touched Page files, your RAM is not really full then, just the way to manage RAM in Mavericks is different.
I believe the new memory compressed has correlation with "Page Outs" which doesn't exist in activity monitor anymore. But still, on my istat menu, i see this.
However, the Swap Used is 0.
I think it's just a matter of algorithm. No big deal as long as no performance issues.
I'm just a bit annoyed by the look of it. LOL.
Wondering if you guys see the same?
If you look in Activity Monitor, you'll see that Mavericks is using as much non-app-used RAM as possible in File Cache to speed things up. It's a method that's been used in Linux for a long time and works really well.
Case in point: My late 2012 iMac 27 inch has 32GB of RAM in it. It was hardly ever fully utilized under Mountain Lion. Now, every bit of that is being used up as well, mostly to cache. And the iMac definitely runs really fast under Mavericks.
If the apps need more RAM, it'll be easily freed up for that use. So there's no need to worry.
The idea here is that you paid for 8GB of RAM. If the OS isn't making SOME use of all 8GB as often as possible, then that investment is wasted. So if the apps don't need it all, then the OS will find another use for the "free" memory.
Annoyed with the look of iStats? The one thing I hate about iStats is there is no way to change the ugly blue that highlights the day in the calendar. Are you annoyed with the memory layout? Looks ok to me, but I can only speak for myself.
I'm using a mid 2012 MBA 4GB Ram, and I always have about 1.73GB free. Now with iStats you can set inactive memory as free memory which I was doing for awhile, but have since turned it off.
Slide023
Last edited:
I think the annoyance was with having page outs/swap when it wasn't clear why it was necessary.
This has been a long-running confusion of mine with OS X architecture. With 16 GB of RAM, if I am using ~10 GB at a time, why is there any swap being used at all? Why any page outs? I don't expect to neatly use exactly 16 GB of RAM before requiring swap, but that's 6 GB overhead that's not being used in lieu of swap, with no clear explanation. Would memory leaks do such a thing?
Also noticed in Mavericks, the initial swap file size has increased from 64 MB to 1 GB. I haven't seen any good justification for this yet and was wondering if anyone had any insights.
Hi,
Newbie to Macs here, and was doing a lot of reading on how Mavericks works with RAM before posting my question/observation.
From what I have read, I shouldn't worry too much about the increased memory usage seen in Mavericks as opposed to ML as long as Swap Used is 0 or low.
My question would be: "What would constitute as low/normal" if I have lots of Free Memory available?
I have 24GB of RAM installed on a refurb 2012 27" iMac I just purchased a month ago (I plan heavy Photoshop and video encoding/editing use in the near future, but I just haven't gotten the chance to crank up my usage to push my system to its capabilities yet). Just to see how much I can make my iMac work, I have multiple tabs open on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox while listening to music on iTunes, while doing some light Photoshop work with Bridge open as well. I was using iMovie the other night ast well, and with all that open, I think the most I have used is 12 GB RAM, which was a bit more than what I was seeing with ML, but not a showstopper from what I've been seeing so far, and still so much less than the 24GB that I have available.
What I notice, though, is whenever I put my Mac to sleep, when I wake it up, my Activity Monitor will say that I have around 100+ MB swap used, and my virtual memory is now 24+ GB, when there was no need for me to use VM when there was still lots of free memory available. If I put it to sleep again and wake it up, I will see my swap used increase close to another 100 MB, and so on. Sometimes, I will notice that after a few minutes after waking it up, the swap used number will go down a bit, but will not go to zero.
Is this normal? What is going on in the background while my Mac is sleeping (maintenance?) that's making it use swap even though I have tons of free RAM available? I have a 1 TB Fusion Drive, if that has to do with anything.
Thanks!
Newbie to Macs here, and was doing a lot of reading on how Mavericks works with RAM before posting my question/observation.
From what I have read, I shouldn't worry too much about the increased memory usage seen in Mavericks as opposed to ML as long as Swap Used is 0 or low.
My question would be: "What would constitute as low/normal" if I have lots of Free Memory available?
I have 24GB of RAM installed on a refurb 2012 27" iMac I just purchased a month ago (I plan heavy Photoshop and video encoding/editing use in the near future, but I just haven't gotten the chance to crank up my usage to push my system to its capabilities yet). Just to see how much I can make my iMac work, I have multiple tabs open on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox while listening to music on iTunes, while doing some light Photoshop work with Bridge open as well. I was using iMovie the other night ast well, and with all that open, I think the most I have used is 12 GB RAM, which was a bit more than what I was seeing with ML, but not a showstopper from what I've been seeing so far, and still so much less than the 24GB that I have available.
What I notice, though, is whenever I put my Mac to sleep, when I wake it up, my Activity Monitor will say that I have around 100+ MB swap used, and my virtual memory is now 24+ GB, when there was no need for me to use VM when there was still lots of free memory available. If I put it to sleep again and wake it up, I will see my swap used increase close to another 100 MB, and so on. Sometimes, I will notice that after a few minutes after waking it up, the swap used number will go down a bit, but will not go to zero.
Is this normal? What is going on in the background while my Mac is sleeping (maintenance?) that's making it use swap even though I have tons of free RAM available? I have a 1 TB Fusion Drive, if that has to do with anything.
Thanks!
Of course, but this doesn't explain why an empty 1 GB swap file has to exist irrespective of swap usage, instead of growing the 64 MB as necessary, as has previously been done.
I have to say I'm pretty impressed with Mavericks memory management so far. I have held off installing on my rMBP but went ahead and upgraded my 2008 iMac which only has 2GB of RAM--and I'm impressed at how well it runs on Mavericks. Hopefully things will go as smoothly when I next install it on my rMBP.
Can anyone tell me what the typical swap size should be? I just got my new rMBP with 8gb ram and running Mavericks. I just restarted and opened up Chrome. The only thing I've done is browse MacRumors and facebook and a few other sites and only in one tab. I just checked my activity monitor and it has used 248mb of swap
My Mac Mini with 16gb of Ram on Mavericks hasn't touched the swap and I'm running Lightroom 5, Photoshop CC, Chrome and iTunes.
My Mac Mini with 16gb of Ram on Mavericks hasn't touched the swap and I'm running Lightroom 5, Photoshop CC, Chrome and iTunes.
Do not forget that the amount of memory under "Used Memory" is taken by "File Cache" which is actually free memory.
Can anyone tell me what the typical swap size should be? I just got my new rMBP with 8gb ram and running Mavericks. I just restarted and opened up Chrome. The only thing I've done is browse MacRumors and facebook and a few other sites and only in one tab. I just checked my activity monitor and it has used 248mb of swap
My Mac Mini with 16gb of Ram on Mavericks hasn't touched the swap and I'm running Lightroom 5, Photoshop CC, Chrome and iTunes.
Ideal swap should always be 0.
So what would cause my new rMBP to swap with such light use? There's literally nothing installed on it yet other than Chrome and Lightroom and Photoshop and I haven't even opened those up yet.
I'm almost always between 7.5 and 7.99 out of 8 GB. Having that much ram used isn't a bad thing as long as you aren't using swap and cleaning your memory is literally pointless unless you need the memory and it isn't being freed for some reason.
But it never frees. Maybe I'm missing something. If I open 3 safari tabs and I close 1 tab isn't it supposed to clear some ram for the no longer open tab. Or is that not how it works. If I open 3 tabs in safari and close 1 it barely gives anything back. Cleaning is a life saver. Because all 5 and ten add up. Every little extra that never comes back finally does after cleaning. If cleaning gives back 5gb of ram then something is wrong. If it was all used then there is nothing to give back. So if 5gb is coming back then that means if was sitting there wasted not being used. It was never being freed. It was obviously not needed in the first place. Because if it was needed badly then cleaning would not have released it.
That's correct it won't free all that ram because then if you were to open the same tab again for example it could be loaded instantly (or much quicker) because that information would still be stored in ram as opposed to re-fetching everything.
No, something is not wrong.
Not correct, because that's not how ram works.
Imagine it like your hard drive.
Would you rather:
A) Redownload every app you ever open from the web each time you want to use it and then trash it after each use
or
B) Save the app on your hard drive and open it right up whenever you need
Obviously you want to use B... Same thing applies to ram. You want as much information saved in ram as possible. There is ZERO benefit to having free ram because inactive ram can be purged and replaced with new info near instantaneously when needed. Therefore OSX leaves as much cached information as possible to save loading times when reopening things.
And what exactly do you think having 5GB of ram sitting doing nothing does for you lol?
"Clearing" your ram as well as cleaning caches will actually make your computer slower in most cases.
