Mavericks using all my ram - 8GB

[thejadedmonkey]

My kernel task was taking up 4.6gb of physical RAM, and my computer was god awful slow. I just rebooted it, but this is definitely a MAJOR issue. I'm not sure what caused it as I was away from my desk, but when I got back I couldn't even close apps without force-quitting them, and activity monitor took about 3 minutes to open.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Ever since Vista came out OS's have been smarter about using available resources instead of just sitting there doing nothing

Haha, this approach to memory management has been in use in Linux a lot longer than that. Probably BSD as well.

 

[odin]

Haha, this approach to memory management has been in use in Linux a lot longer than that. Probably BSD as well.

This is true of X as well. But they have made quit a number of tweaks in this release that are not common in desktop systems. I think since they have talked about it so much more people are simply seeing the things that have been there AND the new stuff as "new."

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I was downloading again, yes. I didn't make an OSX installer the first time. I just ran the upgrade.

I know you're having issues and I'm not making light of THAT. But the issues you're having aren't RAM related. The system based on all your comments and photos is working as intended. Your slowdowns are coming from elsewhere.

That's why the change over to memory pressure is so important. Judging that and the amount of compressed memory is going to be more important than the amount reserved and in-use.

I hope you track down the problem soon. I'm sure it's frustrating. Be sure you're checking CPU cycles as well, sort them by activity, to see if you have something that is running away with free cycles.

 

[throAU]

Haha, this approach to memory management has been in use in Linux a lot longer than that. Probably BSD as well.

Yeah, Linux and BSD have been doing similar since the 90s

 

[Sccrapdog]

In fact with Maverick my Mac is a hell of a lot slower. Under Mountain Lion after I logged in form a cold start I would be on my desktop almost immediately.

With Mavericks after I enter my password and press ENTER I have to wait up to 75 seconds for my desktop to load up and the icons appear and the dock to be functional. This is awful.

Is this what Apple means by utilising my Ram more efficiently?

 

[mlaci96]

Help me!

Mavericks uses 3Gb of my Ram... This seems a bit weird me, wasn't Mavericks supposed to be free it up?

 

[pencilcheck]

My kernel task was taking up 4.6gb of physical RAM, and my computer was god awful slow. I just rebooted it, but this is definitely a MAJOR issue. I'm not sure what caused it as I was away from my desk, but when I got back I couldn't even close apps without force-quitting them, and activity monitor took about 3 minutes to open.

Are you using chrome? I had this problem with chrome and I switched to Safari and everything is back to normal again, albeit some bugs in Safari but life is all good now.

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Mavericks uses 3Gb of my Ram... This seems a bit weird me, wasn't Mavericks supposed to be free it up?

Yea, it uses as a cache to make sure your app can boot up more quickly.

 

[KeegM480]

Fascinating. I didn't know any of that, details I mean. I just opened Activity Monitor and saw a whole new layout.

Thanks.

They made it so that apps/files open faster. Before Mavericks I would have 12GB Inactive, 400MB Free now I have 400MB Inactive, 12GB Free. It keeps your RAM ready to be used.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Are you using chrome? I had this problem with chrome and I switched to Safari and everything is back to normal again, albeit some bugs in Safari but life is all good now.

I don't think I have Chrome installed, but if I do, I definitely wasn't running it. I had a few VM's open, the Android IDE... but no Chrome, and nothing in my workflow changed between yesterday and today that would cause the computer to eat up all of my RAM like that - except Mavericks.

 

[Sccrapdog]

Does this look good or normal to anyone? I have nothing at all running except Google Chrome with only 7 pages open yet I only have 1.5 gigs of free ram left?!!

 

[Quackers]

That looks like mine does after it's been switched on for a few hours.
As long as the green line (memory pressure) is low down it means that it's fine.
If you leave it another couple of hours nearly all the ram will appear to be used up.
As long as your system is not slowing down you're fine.
Don't mistake the spinning pinwheel (multi-coloured or plain blue) for a ram shortage issue (as I did, which was the real point of starting this thread).
I suspect that's a separate issue and is minor on my system now.
My problem with slow opening apps and screens is now completely gone.

 

[dyrer]

my largest memory usage is com.iconservices agent even more than photoshop

 

[throAU]

So true. If Mavericks is able to put file cache into memory and then dynamically compress it to make room for new apps/files this will make the system much more responsive. I wonder if this is a small part of what makes battery life better too. Less activity for the SSD or HDD.

This is exactly why it uses compressed memory to avoid swap. The RAM has power applied at all times, the SSD or HDD will be "sleeping" most of the time and are 100x slower than RAM (or more).

Avoiding use of the SSD or HDD as much as possible (waking them up) saves power and improves response.

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Does this look good or normal to anyone? I have nothing at all running except Google Chrome with only 7 pages open yet I only have 1.5 gigs of free ram left?!!

Image

Read the stats: 0 swap in use, memory pressure graph is green, compressed memory is 0 - you have nothing to worry about. There's a reason apple deliberately did not include a "FREE MEMORY" stat any more.

The way caching works - even if you closed every application, eventually your entire RAM capacity would be used in cache due to time machine or spotlight accessing all the files on your disk.

But thats fine - if the file is needed again, it's in RAM. If the RAM is otherwise needed, the cache is purged. Automatically.

If you are ACTUALLY low on RAM, you will see the compressed figure go up, until it can compress no more and then finally it will start using swap - most likely in your case when you around 12 GB of programs open (accounting for 50% gain from compressions as per arstechnica, and Mavericks purging all its file cache).

 

[CitrusPisser]

In my 2012 cMBP (16gb RAM) Mavericks is using about 7gb in file cache and about 3gb in app memory under fairly light usage. Feels way more responsive, from safari, to graphical animations, files opening.. everything is just way smoother. The memory management overhaul was badly needed and so far I think they've nailed it.

Also, finder tabs and increased video memory on the integrated card are sweet. : )

 

[bbfc]

Mavericks uses 3Gb of my Ram... This seems a bit weird me, wasn't Mavericks supposed to be free it up?

No. Have you actually read this thread!

 

[benwiggy]

Mavericks uses 3Gb of my Ram... This seems a bit weird me, wasn't Mavericks supposed to be free it up?

No. On the contrary, it's suppose to use most of your RAM. All the time. And that's not a bad thing.

Does this look good or normal to anyone? I have nothing at all running except Google Chrome with only 7 pages open yet I only have 1.5 gigs of free ram left?!!

This is normal and good. There is no problem. Now get on with your work!

 

[yliu]

Mine looks a bit weird...

There seems to be still free memory left, so why do I have 169MB of swap memory?

 

[Sccrapdog]

Not so sure about that mate.. when my Mac goes to sleep now and I log back in it takes up to several minutes to become functional after I enter my password.

That can NOT be normal.

 

[kooldown]

1. open terminal
2. type: sudo purge
3. enter password
4. sit back for a second or two and see how memory become available

you don't need to install xcode or something else to run this command. please research about it before using this command. i will not held responsible for any damages done by this ram cleaning command

 

[petsounds]

1. open terminal
2. type: sudo purge
3. enter password
4. sit back for a second or two and see how memory become available

you don't need to install xcode or something else to run this command. please research about it before using this command. i will not held responsible for any damages done by this ram cleaning command

I'm pretty sure (though I'm not yet running Mavericks to verify) Apple got rid of the purge command in 10.9. That's because the way they're managing RAM in Mavericks is quite different than Lion/ML, and there should never be a need to do the purge trick now.

 

[throttlemeister]

Mine looks a bit weird...
View attachment 443612
There seems to be still free memory left, so why do I have 169MB of swap memory?

Mine does the same thing:

And it seems to grow each time it comes out of sleep. But it doesn't seem to impact performance in any way. Machine currently has 7 days uptime, and only 259 page-outs (v 5 million or so page-in). Maybe sleep is dumping some of the memory in swap instead of the sleep file, as my sleepimage file is only 1G large (v 16G in ML). I don't know, it's weird. But as long as it doesn't impact performance I don't care too much.

 

[Actarus]

Theres is actually an issue with memory and some processes. Yesterday I couldn't move a huge amount of data since 2 processes called "kernel_tasks" and "Locum" where eating the whole memory with 6 GB and 2GB each one (My system has 8 GB). The system then told me i was out of memory and asked me to close aplications but ONLY FINDER was opened performing the copy task.

I had to use Carbon Copy cloner to move all this data from one disk to another one without issues (350 GB of data). There is something wrong with finder whe copying several gigas, i think an update is needed.

EDIT: BTW I was moving, not a single file but over 75.000 files in different folders and subfolders with a total of 350GB. I Simply Selected all, copied all and pasted in a different disk.

 

[ABC5S]

Some thing wrong with yours..

This is mine and no issues

 

[h3r0]

If your kernel_task is running high and you are in the red it may be because of a third party app. The mac osx does a lot of in the background indexing. If you have something that is conflicting with spotlight or anything doing a scan that may be your issue. My recommendation is to try it in safe mode. Just boot holding the shift key. The other day we had to temporarily say goodbye to an awesome program called Alfred that enhances a pot light because that is what was making the kernel task run high so much so it was taking up 50 gb of virtual memory.

 

[Actarus]

If your kernel_task is running high and you are in the red it may be because of a third party app. The mac osx does a lot of in the background indexing. If you have something that is conflicting with spotlight or anything doing a scan that may be your issue. My recommendation is to try it in safe mode. Just boot holding the shift key. The other day we had to temporarily say goodbye to an awesome program called Alfred that enhances a pot light because that is what was making the kernel task run high so much so it was taking up 50 gb of virtual memory.

The problem here is that ONLY Finder was running at that moment performing the copy. Every time I tried to copy the 350GB data ended up with the same result. Never happened in previous OS like ML or L. Using CC Cloner did the trick, but I find weird not using Finder for such a simple task. If anyone could try doing something similar we could see if there is a bug in 10.9.

I'll try the same test with my MBA to see if it happens again.