My Macbook Pro can't handle multi tasking...

[MKnight]

It doesn't... I'm just saying in general there are huge performance benefits to the 7200RPM drives for disk I/O intensive stuff.

 

[Rampant.A.I.]

I agree with the OS being unable to reliably free the RAM. It still amazes me that this is a problem this many years into OSX. Safari is a RAM hog even when you quit it.

I sometimes use a cheap app called iFreemem which reallocates the RAM. It takes a minute or 2 and the computer is pretty much unusable for this period. I suggest this using this app whenever you need a coffee or restroom break.

It's not just Safari, it's that OS X just can't reliably clear it's RAM, like you said. You end up having to restart because the system bogs down for no reason, even after you've exited all of the apps.

And they removed our ability to control the use of Virtual Memory, which is also kind of irritating.

 

[00christian00]

I think your problem is unusual. I have never had any issue with memory or my MacBook becoming sluggish. Ever. And I am for sure not a unitasker.
I usually have at least two firefox windows open with a total of about 15-20 tabs, VMWare running XP with 1.5GB memory and AutoCAD Architecture 2010(such a ridiculous resource hog even you'd be amazed), and Adobe Fireworks. Those are just the big ones, i also usually have iTunes and iCal, sometimes Pages, Google Earth and Sketchup.
I also don't restart my computer unless software update tells me I have to. That is sometimes for months, mind you, and it still works great.
Maybe you just have, like, ridiculously high standards.

That's something like my usual setup.So why you can handle all of that easily and I can't?Can you please check how is your swap in Activity Monitor after a while you work with these open?
It's impossible you are not swapping with that setup,and either you have a fast HD,or it's my HD that totally suck.

My standard are not high,otherwise I would have already thrown the Macbook out of the window,I just want to be able to maximize my system performance to at least something my very old notebook could do.
I'm sure there must be a way to "workaround" these problems,I can't believe everyone has SSD or doesn't use heavy programs contemporarily.

I would like to gather here all tips to speed up the mac while using many programs.
So far what I've found is :
1-disable swap.Quite dangerous,not advised.
2-Block flash.Flash for mac suck so bad,this is a must one.
3-iFreeMem.This utility help a lot speedup the mac again,but it take quite long.
4-Defragment.Osx doesn't require defragmenting is ********,it does speed up a lot the system doing a defragment.
5-MemTools.I just find out about this,so I don't know how works it well.It is supposed to release some free ram.Quite fast,but I don't see it releasing the inactive ram,must investigate.

 

[mabaker]

Christian, as I see I’m not the only one who’s having this issue.

Have you been able to sort it out by now?

 

[Denarius]

I have installed clicktoflash few weeks ago and infact it helped a lot!!!
But it only delayed the problem for me

I have just found a program MemTools,and some people claim it help freeing the inactive ram,I'm going to try it these days.Too bad it is shareware,but it's cheap anyway,and if it does really work I would even pay a big price to have a snappy os.

Running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 , with two tabs open in one window. Safari is 115.2MB in RAM and increases by about 0.3MB with every new tab opened.

Personally I would consider experimenting with the RAM by first simply reseating it and see if that sorts things. Failing that you can try removing one DIMM, running for a while to see how it behaves, then swapping for the other DIMM and seeing how that behaves.

A number of people have already suggested that you may have a hardware problem somewhere. Given that your memory usage is odd run the hardware diagnostic from your original install CD, with the extended memory tests and see what it has to say (it will take a very long time). You can also test the memory specifically (and more thoroughly I've been told) with a utility called memtest. If it fails, get Apple to fix it.

Take note that there is definitely a fault somewhere. Your mac is not running how it should. I'd focus on resolving the root problem rather than quick-fix utilities, particularly if it's still under warranty.

Update: I only just noticed that this is an old thread that's only just been revived.. Still, hope it's useful. I think the last post was also prior to the release of 10.6.2 so it might not be applicable now if it was a software problem after all.

 

[t0mat0]

See the Snow Leopard Memory Hog thread on the Apple support Forums.

Definitely the memory management gets worse the more you've got on the machine. Running a VM with 4GB, whilst running all the other stuff - you're likely to come across speed issues due to the HD speed. SSD could help.

 

[chrono1081]

Um, something is wrong with your machine. Id do a reinstall if I were you.

Right at this moment, here is what the macbook pro in my sig is running:

-Aperture - batch processing thousands of 30+ mb raw files that are stored on an external right now.

-Unity 3D - Game engine

-Maya - 3D modeling software

-Photoshop (working on textures for models).

-XCode - Compiling code for a class project

-iTunes

- 2 virtual machines, Ubuntu is updating, and Win 7 is running and I'm using visio.

- Corel Painter

- Socialite

- Adium

- Safari

- Logic Express w/ several virtual instruments loaded

- Rapidweaver (its updating my blog at the moment)

- Maple (math software).

- ZBrush

All running without a hitch. My macbook pro doubles as my work machine since my HP Workstation with xeon processors can't handle the above.

 

[msjones]

I have running:

Firefox (4 tabs)
VMware Fusion Windows XP
iTunes with a 25GB library
Panic Unison
Apple Mail

This is running on my macbook 5,2 with 2GB RAM. No slow downs at all.

 

[CylonGlitch]

VMWare is a pig if you let it be. Did you adjust the settings on it? It will lock all of the RAM in your system if you let it. Go to the settings and configure it to only use 1GB or maybe 2GB of RAM, once you've told it how much RAM to use it will lock it. Same thing with the CPU's. Don't let it use BOTH cores, otherwise it will make your Mac side horrible. Tie it to one processor. I use my Fusion settings as 1 core, 2GB of RAM, basically the app is eating 1/2 of my computer completely. If you start devouring RAM by running Photoshop, 50+ tabs in Safari and more, well, that's going to cause things to swap; regardless of the OS.

I often have 20+ apps running, 5 to 10 Safari tabs, and Fusion and I don't get too many problems -- BUT I know the limitations, pushing too hard does cause swapping because, well, you've allocated all the resources.

Just this morning on my PC in Vista64 I was installing Battlefield 2 and Microsoft Security Essentials kicked in; for 2 hours I couldn't do ANYTHING with that machine because it was swapping like crazy (it has 4GB of RAM). Windows was thrashing the hard drive, that was the bottleneck because three things were trying to all do major access to it at once. It wasn't nice.

 

[wilsonhaven]

Um, something is wrong with your machine. Id do a reinstall if I were you.

Right at this moment, here is what the macbook pro in my sig is running:

-Aperture - batch processing thousands of 30+ mb raw files that are stored on an external right now.

-Unity 3D - Game engine

-Maya - 3D modeling software

-Photoshop (working on textures for models).

-XCode - Compiling code for a class project

-iTunes

- 2 virtual machines, Ubuntu is updating, and Win 7 is running and I'm using visio.

- Corel Painter

- Socialite

- Adium

- Safari

- Logic Express w/ several virtual instruments loaded

- Rapidweaver (its updating my blog at the moment)

- Maple (math software).

- ZBrush

All running without a hitch. My macbook pro doubles as my work machine since my HP Workstation with xeon processors can't handle the above.

Not fair. You are using a fully tricked out dream machine ... //laughs

 

[chrono1081]

Not fair. You are using a fully tricked out dream machine ... //laughs

I love my machine I upgraded from the non-unibody macbook pro and there was a decent speed difference from the faster ram.

Ill end up with a mac pro though as soon as they update. I could REALLY REALLY use the internal harddrive bays. I have waaaay too many externals right now

 

[atse]

Okay first check your hd. i had that problem too, i am a photographer and i have 8 pictures (raw) open in photoshop opened, along with Lightroom (which takes up a **** ton of ram), plus flash, pretty much my mac couldn't keep up cause my hd clusters and data were faulty, put your mac cd and run that when you restart, after taht go to disk utility, and run verify disk, if it is your hd, then repair it, make sure you back up your data. and if not well upgrade to a solid state drive, its not your ram bro, you ahve more then enough, your hd plays a major part for this.

 

[witness]

My setup:

3GB RAM
5400RPM HD
2.33Ghz C2D

And I'm currently running:

Show Leopard
Chrome (32 tabs)
Firefox (2 tabs)
Safari (1 tab)
Mail
Skype
iTunes
TextMate (2 windows, multiple tabs)
Terminal
Parallels running in Coherence mode (significantly faster than VMWare)
Windows 7 x86 (1GB allocated)
Visual Studio 2008
SQL Server 2008
CommandLine

Sure it's not the fastest machine on the planet, but it's definitely very usable.

Bear in mind that modern OS's tend to use all available RAM (i currently have 22mb free) even if they don't need it. it's quicker to keep things in memory then load them again if they are needed later, but they can be very quickly removed if the RAM is needed for something else. This setup usually amounts to a performance increase.

The only times that I really noticed real performance issues with OSX was when running low on drive space (<1GB) and also when I was using VMWare.

 

[eskalation.dk]

That's something like my usual setup.So why you can handle all of that easily and I can't?Can you please check how is your swap in Activity Monitor after a while you work with these open?
It's impossible you are not swapping with that setup,and either you have a fast HD,or it's my HD that totally suck.

My standard are not high,otherwise I would have already thrown the Macbook out of the window,I just want to be able to maximize my system performance to at least something my very old notebook could do.
I'm sure there must be a way to "workaround" these problems,I can't believe everyone has SSD or doesn't use heavy programs contemporarily.

I would like to gather here all tips to speed up the mac while using many programs.
So far what I've found is :
1-disable swap.Quite dangerous,not advised.
2-Block flash.Flash for mac suck so bad,this is a must one.
3-iFreeMem.This utility help a lot speedup the mac again,but it take quite long.
4-Defragment.Osx doesn't require defragmenting is ********,it does speed up a lot the system doing a defragment.
5-MemTools.I just find out about this,so I don't know how works it well.It is supposed to release some free ram.Quite fast,but I don't see it releasing the inactive ram,must investigate.

I have had quite a lot of problems with my MBP lately regarding memory and CPU usage (my mbp is over 3 years old, a C2D 2.33, 2 GB DDR2 ram), but i reformatted, and now i have pretty decent performance again, even though is more than a month ago now - the fans are blowing atm, but thats because im charging, and because of the fans being ****** after 3 hard years of endless abuse

As we speak i have the following open:
Flashbuilder (Eclipse) (31 files) (its a memory hog)
Illustrator (1 file, a logo)
InDesign (3 files, 1 mag, and 2 A4 sheets)
Photoshop (1 file, a big web layout one)
Mail
Firefox (4 tabs)
TextEdit and
Firefox,

and i still have 631 mb ram free.

For me i believe that OS X had some random crap-app that kept on memory leaking. But here are some other tips:

Remove icons from your desktop.
Remove unneeded dashboard widgets
Have AT LEAST 10gb available on your hdd... (thats just the way osx works)
Uninstall/deactivate unused fonts (if you have a font management app - must have btw)

 

[TechieJustin]

Hm...
Activity monitor really does give me a whole lot of information!

 

[AppleLovsProfit]

Hello everybody.

Instead of making a new thread I think it is best that I/we continue in this one. This is a big problem I think. I have talked with Humac several times and they do not want to get into the root of the problem, acutally I have been presented with different contradictionary solutions. ("Your HDD is done for", "Do a clean install and youll see" and of course the good old Apple sentence "ur logic board is bad" It has cost me a lot of money, but im to stubborn, I want to fix this!

I am running a Penryn and experince the same problem as "00christian00", though with a lot less APPs, my beachball appears for instance when running VLC, Safari and PokerStars.
I have done a numerous clean installs, have tried all the different Snow Leopard versions, running on 2 different HDDs and now a SSD. The beachball is still appearing for about 30 secs then i am able to continue my work. I also recently popped in new RAM, but to no help.

I think it would be great if one could find out if this is actually hardware or software related, so if anyone have any news, dont hesitate to share

I think though that I can conclude that it is not :

HDD/SSD related

PS: IF it is the processor that is flawed would it then not completely shut down?

PPS: Does Apple offer official statements concerning bugs in their different Macbooks and software products? I cannot find anything regarding Penryn.