I'm just... This software is all so wasteful!

[FroColin]

Okay.... Mountain Lion takes almost 2gb to run on my rMBP, my dock takes 136mb to run of "real memory" WHAT IS UP WITH THAT. I came from snow leopard and a mac pro, refusing to upgrade because I wouldn't use any of the new features. I have 16gb of RAM on this thing and I feel like that's barely enough! That would be DOUBLE what my mac pro has and I hardly hit the max on that thing (yes this is in part because Final Cut Pro 7 and CS4 are all 32 bit so one application can't use more then 4gb but still). I feel like I have to restart often! My free memory sometimes gets down bellow one gig. This is in part because Parallels uses like... 6.5gb but... I mean Safari with a couple windows open uses like a gig (yes I know this depends on the contents of the page). Is this really necessary? 4 years ago, 4gb of ram was plenty, it was a lot. I feel like there is almost no functionality change between then and now, and I know having a Retina display must add to it because it has to store bigger files but would it really be this bad?

Someone explain to me how this has gotten so out of hand. I don't think this OS could even run on computers all that old. I don't know how it would work with like 2gb. But 2gb is a lot! Why... Is this just software bloat?

 

[MisterMe]

Not this again OS X is a Unix-based preemptive multitasking multiuser virtual memory operating system. The OS handles memory allocation. Free memory is wasted memory. The OS endeavors to use all memory available to it. Your search for free memory is a fool's errand.

 

[FroColin]

I've heard that before, but then why does everyone talk about how the OS uses 2gb or 1.5gb or whatever as though when it uses more it's a bad thing? Are these people just uninformed? (as you so kindly told me I was) So I should be glad that my OS uses 1/8th of my 16gb memory? Would Snow Leopard use as much or more on this system if this computer could run snow Leopard?

 

[MCAsan]

post deleted by owner

 

[gorskiegangsta]

The OS handles memory allocation. Free memory is wasted memory.

Not when lack of free memory contributes to paging activity. I have noticed an increased paging activity in ML which, sometimes results in stutters and delayed input register on my machine (13" early 2011 MBP, 8GB RAM). For some reason ML has trouble releasing inactive memory even when there's only 10-20MB active memory left. I think Apple still has a few kinks to work out with ML memory management.

 

[MisterMe]

I've heard that before, but then why does everyone talk about how the OS uses 2gb or 1.5gb or whatever as though when it uses more it's a bad thing? Are these people just uninformed? (as you so kindly told me I was) So I should be glad that my OS uses 1/8th of my 16gb memory? Would Snow Leopard use as much or more on this system if this computer could run snow Leopard?

People seem to think that OS X is a version of Windows 95 or System 7.1. So yes, they are just uninformed. And what does the OS using 1/8th of your physical memory have to do with anything?