4gb MBA - Safari Beachballs!

[Meister]

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.

I always get very brief beachballs on every mac and app I use. Sometimes things need to load and a beachball comes for a second or two. I don't see that as a big deal. What I noticed with netflix however is that it pushes the memory pressure up if I let it run for a long time. I suspect silverlight as the culprit.

 

[cycledance]

I always get very brief beachballs on every mac and app I use. Sometimes things need to load and a beachball comes for a second or two. I don't see that as a big deal. What I noticed with netflix however is that it pushes the memory pressure up if I let it run for a long time. I suspect silverlight as the culprit.

time for a new machine then.

i'd go crazy if i saw a beachball on my macs more than once a day. only see them when something is seriously hanging every couple days.

 

[Meister]

time for a new machine then.

Once you see a beachball it's time for new equipment. Sound advise ...

 

[motrek]

time for a new machine then.

i'd go crazy if i saw a beachball on my macs more than once a day. only see them when something is seriously hanging every couple days.

Depends on the software you're using. Whenever an application doesn't respond immediately to its message queue, you'll see a beachball. This can happen for a million different reasons that aren't related to how fast your computer is.

 

[Meister]

Depends on the software you're using. Whenever an application doesn't respond immediately to its message queue, you'll see a beachball. This can happen for a million different reasons that aren't related to how fast your computer is.

I have to modify my statement a bit. I was at a different place over the weekend, where I was using my mac mini. It has an hdd and likes to beachball every time I open apps. My rmbp i am on right now only rarely does this. Mainly when I export media content, because the dual core is a bit slow.

 

[SmOgER]

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.

What I take from this is that you yourself have 8+GB of RAM and are trying to justify it at all costs while not being a power-user. Otherwise it's a pure nonse what you are writing here. Right now I have opened 9 Safari tabs, 1 Chrome tab, R Console, Taco HTML and many smaller apps like textwrangler(with many files), mail, paintbrush.. and my 4GB RAM pressure is as follows:

I don't even bother closing tabs or apps unless I'am saving battery power.

 

[cycledance]

What I take from this is that you yourself have 8+GB of RAM and are trying to justify it at all costs while not being a power-user. Otherwise it's a pure nonse what you are writing here. Right now I have opened 9 Safari tabs, 1 Chrome tab, R Console, Taco HTML and many smaller apps like textwrangler(with many files), mail, paintbrush.. and my 4GB RAM pressure is as follows:

Image

contrary to what the max 4gb ram squad here will tell u...i say u have a little problem already. your ram is being compressed and swapped. it doesn't matter if apple coloured this state green. your cpu is involved because u have too little ram.

it's doesn't matter now. but what if you want to do more. what if os x becomes more demanding. that's why it's better to go for 8gb in a new machine. (yea i know this thread isn't about that) it's future-proof. it's easier on the cpu. better resale value. more ram for the gpu. smoother operation all around.

 

[Meister]

contrary to what the max 4gb ram squad here will tell u...i say u have a little problem already. your ram is being compressed and swapped. it doesn't matter if apple coloured this state green. your cpu is involved because u have too little ram.

This afternoon I was on a 16gb 2014 15" rmbp. With safari (1tab: apple.com) and settings open it was using 1gb of swap. It also had several hundred mb compressed memory. Memory pressure was rock bottom. According to your logic it was already not having enough memory.

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it's doesn't matter now. but what if you want to do more. what if os x becomes more demanding. that's why it's better to go for 8gb in a new machine. (yea i know this thread isn't about that) it's future-proof. it's easier on the cpu. better resale value. more ram for the gpu. smoother operation all around.

All valid. However this is true for every upgrade.

 

[SmOgER]

contrary to what the max 4gb ram squad here will tell u...i say u have a little problem already. your ram is being compressed and swapped. it doesn't matter if apple coloured this state green. your cpu is involved because u have too little ram.

it's doesn't matter now. but what if you want to do more. what if os x becomes more demanding. that's why it's better to go for 8gb in a new machine. (yea i know this thread isn't about that) it's future-proof. it's easier on the cpu. better resale value. more ram for the gpu. smoother operation all around.

That's how OS X works, it will use a bit of swap (I'am sure for a good reasons) even if there are plenty of RAM. Having more RAM won't change this.

About 8GB for a new MBA, I would probably choose that myself if I was buying one at the moment, but that would SOLELY be because of the resale value and very reasonable Apple upgrade cost (and probably cause it "sounds cooler" if I'am being completely honest haha). There's plenty of RAM reserve for me with this portable device having 4GB even if "os x becomes more demanding", especially considering that it has SSD. I had some pretty demanding tasks running more than once, but I don't ever recall it slowing down or throwing low memory errors like some windows machines.

 

[cycledance]

That's how OS X works, it will use a bit of swap (I'am sure for a good reasons) even if there are plenty of RAM. Having more RAM won't change this.

false. i never have swaps or memory pressure. even after weeks i check the activity monitor and it's flat with 0 swap. it depends how much ram you have. probably only possible at 16+ gigs.

 

[SmOgER]

Nevertheless, that's not an indicator of whether you have enough memory or not. Certainly not on Yosemite.

 

[Meister]

false. i never have swaps or memory pressure.

How do you not have memory pressure? If there is no green your activity monitor is broken.

 

[cycledance]

How do you not have memory pressure? If there is no green your activity monitor is broken.

it's flat. it's green. it doesn't do anything. happy?

 

[capathy21]

false. i never have swaps or memory pressure. even after weeks i check the activity monitor and it's flat with 0 swap. it depends how much ram you have. probably only possible at 16+ gigs.

Now I know why you guys tell everyone to max out their ram. You don't understand how it works with Yosemite. I've used 4 and 8gb models and they've both swapped even with basic usage. Yosemite uses available ram and you will see swap. That does not mean you don't have enough ram.

 

[Panthios]

-I would start with disabling any Safari Addons.
I know Adblock Plus gave me beachballs often. Try uBlock.

 

[Meister]

Now I know why you guys tell everyone to max out their ram. You don't understand how it works with Yosemite. I've used 4 and 8gb models and they've both swapped even with basic usage.

So do macbooks with 16gb. I have never seen a macbook with any amount of ram that doesn't start to show a number under swap and compressed memory after they run for a while. And I have a thing for monitoring the activity monitor Cycledance must have a magical macbook that always shows swap: 0

I have however observed that the memory pressure is usually lower on machines with more ram.
Of course that is to be expect.

 

[Panthios]

So do macbooks with 16gb. I have never seen a macbook with any amount of ram that doesn't start to show a number under swap and compressed memory after they run for a while. And I have a thing for monitoring the activity monitor Cycledance must have a magical macbook that always shows swap: 0

Yea.. exactly, I would hope that people dont use that memory cleaning software. I know people see "memory used" and thing because there is no free ram that it is a bad thing. Free Ram = wasted Ram. Mac OS does a lot of caching and it tries to utilize as much ram as it can.

 

[martinm0]

View attachment 534653

I don't believe anyone else commented on this, but did you notice the "kernel_task" process at the top of your list? I've seen that before and found that it was causing all kinds of havoc on my machine. Is that still present? On my MBP, the battery had died and that process would chew up all the resources.

Also, I have a late 2012 iMac 27" 3.4 i7, 24GB RAM, 680MX 2GB GPU, and I get beachballs like crazy with safari in Yosemite. So many, that I thought it was also RAM based and upped the 8GB to 24GB and it still beachballs to no end, so as others have said, I don't think RAM is your issue either.

I haven't put much time into the issue yet, but I downgraded to base install of 10.10 and the issue persists (although possibly not quite as bad).

Here's hoping the next release will address this issue.

 

[motrek]

...
Also, I have a late 2012 iMac 27" 3.4 i7, 24GB RAM, 680MX 2GB GPU, and I get beachballs like crazy with safari in Yosemite. So many, that I thought it was also RAM based and upped the 8GB to 24GB and it still beachballs to no end, so as others have said, I don't think RAM is your issue either.
...

Might try Chrome. I know a lot of people on this forum hate it but it's been fine for me. Doesn't hurt to try.

 

[DJTaurus]

-I would start with disabling any Safari Addons.
I know Adblock Plus gave me beachballs often. Try uBlock.

Yeap i use abblock which had some problems on the first version of yosemite if i am not mistaken.

Might try Chrome. I know a lot of people on this forum hate it but it's been fine for me. Doesn't hurt to try.

As my friends have told me Chrome seems to use less memory.... but unfortunately i ve stopped using all of googles programs/services except youtube on safari/mac... on the iphone i use protube. I try to stay away from that company as possible i can.

I don't believe anyone else commented on this, but did you notice the "kernel_task" process at the top of your list? I've seen that before and found that it was causing all kinds of havoc on my machine. Is that still present?

Yeap its still present.

 

[motrek]

...
As my friends have told me Chrome seems to use less memory.... but unfortunately i ve stopped using all of googles programs/services except youtube on safari/mac... on the iphone i use protube. I try to stay away from that company as possible i can.
...

Fair enough. Firefox is another option. It feels slower to me but I know people who like it. Might just depend on which web sites you visit.