Mavericks and RAM

[chabig]

Yes exactly but not releasing the memory can be bad also. What if you have 7.99gb used. Now you open iphoto or imovie. You will crash because there is no more memory left. Or has the beachball been eliminated from 10.9

Nope. You won't crash anything. The OS will manage the RAM and it will just work.

 

[nzalog]

You actually want your OS to use as much memory as possible as long as the way it uses it, it can be free'd when applications need it. Why would you want the fastest storage on your computer sitting there empty and idle?

 

[throttlemeister]

You actually want your OS to use as much memory as possible as long as the way it uses it, it can be free'd when applications need it. Why would you want the fastest storage on your computer sitting there empty and idle?

Agreed.

Here's a screen from my Mac Mini server. All memory used. No foreground programs running at that time. Yet it is dramatically faster loading up XBMC and it's movie library. And if I start another program that I don't use that often, it will just release whatever memory is needed.

Also, look at the Activity Monitor, not iStat. The stats in iStat do not line up perfectly (yet?), though if you know how to read them the information is there. If Activity Monitor is showing green, like in my screenshot, there is nothing to worry about. If it gets to orange or red, then you need to worry.

 

[MartinAppleGuy]

My memory usage has gone up. I used to be under 4GB -5GB when running Coda, Chrome/Safari, iCal, Mail and Reminders. Now I'm constantly getting up to 7GB. :/

EDIT/NOTE: My Swap is now 0 though.

Was it just randomly lowered?

 

[pastrychef]

I love the memory management of Mavericks. In my opinion, it's the single biggest upgrade of the new OS and far, far better than what Mountain Lion had.

 

[kage207]

Was it just randomly lowered?

What do you mean? I'm consistently hitting 5GB usage now when I used to be at 3.5GB usage before Mavericks. That's just me though. I know I'm a 'power' user compared to others but I am also a programmer.

 

[Caviar]

How do you guys think of Mavericks RAM management when the OS is used professionally. I'm pretty sure its a great feature if casual users are using it.

But what about for example DAW's.
Loading huge Sample Libraries etc.
My RAM gets full really fast and only about have of the RAM is taken by my samples. The rest is like File Cache or something.
And yes, I know when RAM is needed the OS will release it but during that process, my application will stop respond for a few seconds and I don't feel comfortable with that...

 

[chabig]

I've never been to a nightclub or concert where I've seen the artist use anything other than a Mac. I'm sure it's fine. Apple isn't tuning OS performance for amateurs vs professionals.

 

[illusionmist]

What good is memory if you don't want it to be used at all... Unless you're experiencing major performance issues, get used to letting the OS manage it for you instead of worrying/checking/cleaning it all the time and be happy.

 

[chabig]

What good is memory if you don't want it to be used at all... Unless you're experiencing major performance issues, get used to letting the OS manage it for you instead of worrying/checking/cleaning it all the time and be happy.

Exactly!...and stop looking at Activity Monitor!

 

[leandrofgj]

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 there!

Didn't you experience an increase of load averages on Mavericks? Because on my Macbook Pro load averages are now almost always above 1.00. Could this be because it's a Late-2007 MBP and old laptops use more resources to run the new OS X 10.9? It's strange because I don't see any high CPU usage (CPU is almost idle), no high disk activity...

 

[saberahul]

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.

Same here. 0 swap used in general but even with nothing used it says Used: 7.99. Lol…