Mac Pro using WAY too much RAM

I wouldn't worry about it. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. They've likely optimised Mavericks to make use of what's available. The entire memory management system has been greatly overhauled.

 

Mavericks has a different way of handling memory though I think you're running into 10.9.0 teething issues. check your activity monitor for unusual stuff perhaps.

 

That's a slightly different slant on things. Yes, I concur, have a look at you activity monitor to see what's actually eating your memory. Have your favourite programs been updated by the vendors to work optimally with Mavericks, I wonder?

 

I foresaw that we would get many posts here with people saying "OMG, where's all my precious free RAM?" when Mavx came out.
Mavericks is designed to use your RAM. Most of it. It doesn't need free RAM to load more apps into.
As for your memory errors with those apps: you may want to check whether those apps need updating to run on Mavx.

 

i've not paid too much attention to protools for a few years, but i know that they always used to be very stroppy about what operating system you could run a particular version on. i'd guess that for performance reasons or something they end up doing things in code that they know they prolly shouldn't thus creating a flakiness as soon as things change.

 

I was under the impression that this release of OS X used every bit of RAM and managed it radically different from the last. I noticed the terminal purge command was gone and read into it a little. Isn't this normal behavior for the operating system? Not saying programs might not have incompatibilities but mine is currently running on almost all 8GB (only 1/10th of a GB free) and I've had no slowdowns at all.

 

You should have checked with your application providers before upgrading. Here is a message from the protools forum you should read.