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4gb MBA - Safari Beachballs!

DJTaurus

DJTaurus

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 31, 2012
1,785
1,396
I have the first haswell entry level MBA with 4gbs of ram.

Occasionally i experienced beachballs with safari on mavericks....

But with yosemite after a while of usage (after quit safari or reboot) i get beachballs all the time....the problem is that even when i close most of the tabs and i leave 2-3 the beachball issue doesnt gets away.... only solution is to quit safari and reopen it..... until the new beachball will occur.....

It driving me nuts... apple should never ship a Mac with less than 8GB.... except if they have the time and the balls to optimize the system like devs did in the 70es with Amigas before Moneysoft era.

Apps i always have opened are (viber,itunes,mail,tweetbot and radium... i only use safari on full screen)

Apple should at least give us the option to upgrade the ram for gods shake.
 
DJTaurus said:
I have the first haswell entry level MBA with 4gbs of ram.

Occasionally i experienced beachballs with safari on mavericks....

But with yosemite after a while of usage (after quit safari or reboot) i get beachballs all the time....the problem is that even when i close most of the tabs and i leave 2-3 the beachball issue doesnt gets away.... only solution is to quit safari and reopen it..... until the new beachball will occur.....

It driving me nuts... apple should never ship a Mac with less than 8GB.... except if they have the time and the balls to optimize the system like devs did in the 70es with Amigas before Moneysoft era.

Apps i always have opened are (viber,itunes,mail,tweetbot and radium... i only use safari on full screen)

Apple should at least give us the option to upgrade the ram for gods shake.
Click to expand...

How do you know the problem is RAM? What does Activity Monitor say?
 
motrek said:
how do you know the problem is ram? What does activity monitor say?
Click to expand...

Screen Shot 2015-03-13 at 9.34.19 ?.?..png
 
AFEPPL said:
It could be many things.. but on RAM, the less RAM you have, the more CPU cycles and free space on your startup disk are devoted to paging and swap files, respectively.
...
Click to expand...

Only if you're running into memory pressure issues. Which the OP isn't.
 
joshlalonde said:
Yeah, notice that Memory Pressure gauge?
If it's green, then you have nothing to worry about concerning RAM.

Don't start a 4GB vs 8GB RAM argument please.
Just, know that your memory pressure shows that the problem you are having is not RAM-related.
Click to expand...

The screenshot has been taken after quit/reopen the safari when beachballs have stopped.... i will upload new screenshot when they will occur again.
 
4GB of ram is more than enough to open a few safari web pages. I have 4GB on my 2014 11 inch MBA and have no problem having multiple Safari tabs open.
 
motrek said:
Only if you're running into memory pressure issues. Which the OP isn't.
Click to expand...

CPU cycles are consumed if you don't have available free memory - thats regardless of if its compression or swap (paging of data). By use of an SSD you increase the bandwidth to move/retrieve data, but you never fix the issue, just reduce its impact. The graphic is not taken during the event, so the SBBoD could be CPU, Memory or an errant process thats simply stopped responding.
 
Last edited:
AFEPPL said:
CPU cycles are consumed if you don't have available free memory - thats regardless of if its compression or swap (paging of data). By use of an SSD you increase the bandwidth to move/retrieve data, but you never fix the issue, just reduce its impact. The graphic is not taken during the event, so the SBBoD could be CPU, Memory or an errant process thats simply stopped responding.
Click to expand...

The OP clearly has free memory. Look at his file cache, it's 550MB.
 
It's free now, but it could have been freed by quitting whatever he was doing and the memory got released TO file cache... Unless you take the screenshot during the event it's not a real indication of the problem.
 
Either way,
It's not an inherit problem with having 4GB RAM... something funky is going on. We're not having a RAM (4v8) argument okay? Just keep those opinions to yourselves and let's talk about OPs problem.

He's not yet posted the updated screenshot so no way to know.
 
4Gb of ram allows me 10 tabs in Safari, 10 in Chrome, iTunes, iMessage, Word, Excel, and Mail all while staying in the green with memory pressure.

OP the problem is definitely not ram.
 
DJTaurus said:
I have the first haswell entry level MBA with 4gbs of ram.

Occasionally i experienced beachballs with safari on mavericks....

But with yosemite after a while of usage (after quit safari or reboot) i get beachballs all the time....the problem is that even when i close most of the tabs and i leave 2-3 the beachball issue doesnt gets away.... only solution is to quit safari and reopen it..... until the new beachball will occur.....

It driving me nuts... apple should never ship a Mac with less than 8GB.... except if they have the time and the balls to optimize the system like devs did in the 70es with Amigas before Moneysoft era.

Apps i always have opened are (viber,itunes,mail,tweetbot and radium... i only use safari on full screen)

Apple should at least give us the option to upgrade the ram for gods shake.
Click to expand...

you can only do so much with 4gb of ram.

be aware that the users named motrek, meister and capathy21 are in absolutely every ram thread, upvoting each other and telling people that little ram is never a problem, that 2-4gb is enough and people waste their money by adding more when configuring new machines.
 
cycledance said:
you can only do so much with 4gb of ram.

be aware that the users named motrek, meister and capathy21 are in absolutely every ram thread, upvoting each other and telling people that little ram is never a problem, that 2-4gb is enough and people waste their money by adding more when configuring new machines.
Click to expand...
It's a big RAM conspiracy. Everyone is in it except you :p
 
cycledance said:
no it's just a couple here including you. and it appears like this cause you guys are aggressive and rude to other posters so they tend to be silent.
Click to expand...
So far almost every poster in this thread has given very good advise. Your comments however are, as usual, ad huminom attacks and somewhat delusional. They are also off topic.
 
Meister said:
So far almost every poster in this thread has given very good advise. Your comments however are, as usual, ad huminom attacks and somewhat delusional. They are also off topic.
Click to expand...

careful there. your posts have been moderated before.
 
capathy21 said:
4Gb of ram allows me 10 tabs in Safari, 10 in Chrome, iTunes, iMessage, Word, Excel, and Mail all while staying in the green with memory pressure.

OP the problem is definitely not ram.
Click to expand...

I have been experimenting with an 11" MBA (two of them, actually) for the last week, both 4GB machines, both running Yosemite. My results have been exactly the same, very low memory pressure. Something else is going on with the OP's machine.
 
cycledance said:
you can only do so much with 4gb of ram.

be aware that the users named motrek, meister and capathy21 are in absolutely every ram thread, upvoting each other and telling people that little ram is never a problem, that 2-4gb is enough and people waste their money by adding more when configuring new machines.
Click to expand...

Would it kill you to have some perspective? It depends on the users workload. We are flattered that you follow us from thread to thread but if you'd pay attention to what we say, you would see that we don't just declare that everyone max out their ram, or that they only need 4gb, but rather take into consideration what they need.

If you seriously think that ram is the reason Safari is giving the OP beach balls then you really aren't qualified to give ram advice.

I've posted my normal workload many times to show just how much you can do with 4gb of ram. It must be that my Mac is a special version that actually has 16 gb of ram disguised as 4gb. :rolleyes:

The majority of users that surf, do word documents, email and other basic tasks are fine with 4gb of ram. That is not debatable. I'm sure you will try to debate it but we both know that a basic workload doesn't require more.
 
After reseting PRAM no issues the last 1 and a half day. I will report again if anything will occur during the week. However i need to inform that i did a clear install of Yosemite 1 month ago.

As i said the opened apps i use daily are: radium,viber,mail,itunes,tweetbot and safari (only app on full screen).
 
DJTaurus said:
After reseting PRAM no issues the last 1 and a half day. I will report again if anything will occur during the week. However i need to inform that i did a clear install of Yosemite 1 month ago.

As i said the opened apps i use daily are: radium,viber,mail,itunes,tweetbot and safari (only app on full screen).
Click to expand...
I noticed something odd lately. Netlfix seems to be a real memory hog when I force a 5800 bit rate.
This might be because I am running it with silverlight. I heard that there is an html5 version as well. Anybody care to comment?
 
Meister said:
I noticed something odd lately. Netlfix seems to be a real memory hog when I force a 5800 bit rate.
This might be because I am running it with silverlight. I heard that there is an html5 version as well. Anybody care to comment?
Click to expand...

I am also using youtube on html5 and beachball mostly occurs when i have opened lots of tabs with videos. But if i wont make the tab active the video doesnt starts to load.
 
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