Not releasing memory?

[sigbiz]

Has anyone else noticed memory problems?

I have an App that shows free memory and can force release of more. Normally I only use when I have Photoshop hard at work but since loading Mavericks have kept finding low memory just with a handful of low memory apps open and before opening Photoshop. I have 8gb installed and it has not been a problem before.

 

[anzio]

OS X Mavericks has changed the way memory is handled. It will use quite a bit now for better responsiveness. After reading the forums, it's not unusual to see RAM pretty close to maxed out.

I have Safari, Twitter, Skype, Chrome, and Activity Monitor open and I'm at 11.1GB/16GB RAM used.

Are you suffering performance-wise?

 

[Crazy Badger]

I think it's great that it's trying to use all the RAM available. What's the point in putting 32GB into an iMac if it's only going to use 8-16? Use it all and don't show me no beachballs!

 

[benwiggy]

Has anyone else noticed memory problems?

I have an App that shows free memory and can force release of more. Normally I only use when I have Photoshop hard at work but since loading Mavericks have kept finding low memory just with a handful of low memory apps open and before opening Photoshop. I have 8gb installed and it has not been a problem before.

Do you actually have a problem? Apart from "memory being used"?

As said, 10.9 uses memory in a COMPLETELY different way. Throw away your pointless "Memory Clean" apps. They are needed even less now than they ever were before (which wasn't much).

If you are not experiencing performance issues, then you have no problem. Go back to your work.

 

[ivnj]

In the app store I downloaded "memory clean" aznd works great. I was at 5gb out of 8gb. The after a cleaning I went down to 3.5gb. So I never have to worry about memory again.

But after restarting I showed 3gb of ram used. And "memory clean" said I was using 2gb of ram" How can there be so much difference. After a cleaning it showed pretty close to the same in both "memory clean" and "activity monitor". But before cleaning its always 1 higher than thew other. Doesn't make sense. One has to be wrong.

 

[jhfenton]

Do you actually have a problem? Apart from "memory being used"?

As said, 10.9 uses memory in a COMPLETELY different way. Throw away your pointless "Memory Clean" apps. They are needed even less now than they ever were before (which wasn't much).

If you are not experiencing performance issues, then you have no problem. Go back to your work.

This bears repeating. Delete all "memory clean" apps. They are useless, at best. Mavericks aggressively caches data, and you are defeating that by forcing a purge.

Unless you are getting errors or having performance issues, don't worry about your memory. If you want to look in Activity Monitor, then focus on the "Swap Used" number. If that is zero or low, Mavericks is fine.

John

 

[mingqing007]

This bears repeating. Delete all "memory clean" apps. They are useless, at best. Mavericks aggressively caches data, and you are defeating that by forcing a purge.

Unless you are getting errors or having performance issues, don't worry about your memory. If you want to look in Activity Monitor, then focus on the "Swap Used" number. If that is zero or low, Mavericks is fine.

John

Totally agree!

 

[ivnj]

Well its not caching anything. Because I had 5b of ram and after a cleaning I went down to 3.5gb. So the memory cleaner is working now.

It was the same in snow leopard. My mini from 2006 (I ebayed it in 2012) was only 2gb of ram max capable. Not enough so it would beach ball all the time. Even only a few program open and 2 or 3 safari tabs would see the rainbow beach ball all the time. Like barely after half an hour. So osx has never been good with memory.

 

[sigbiz]

Yeah, it took me a little while to figure out what was going on . I now think the memory management is the most significant feature of Mavericks. In processing images within photoshop I am now handling far more within a batch then could ever do before

 

[grahamperrin]

Parallels on Mavericks

… late 2011 mbp i7 with 16Gb. What;s amazing is that it somehow still manages to use all the memory with a few apps open. …

… that's optimal. Please read about interpreting memory pressure and so on.

There's an Apple support article for Activity Monitor.

(When I last checked, some of the help that's integral to the operating system was wrong for at least one aspect of memory management.)

It's not optimal when parallels has to load up and takes an extra few minutes to allocate memory, whereas after a reboot it will load instantly. It's fine being optimal, but leave some space for a new app to run.

Which version of Parallels?

Nice thought but an OS can't predict whether, when, if or which app you might launch, its only option would be to leave memory unused/wasted (delete depending on your point of view), but then how much to leave space for - Aperture? Dropbox? Assume the worst?

That sounds like a route to Windoze-esque memory management, keep as much as possible empty....just in case....

Related/retrospective

Compressed Memory and Virtualization

… with Mavericks I'm able to run Windows XP with IE6, Windows 7 with IE8 and Windows 8 with IE10 side-by-side with absolutely no slow-downs.

… I'm using a Late 2011 15" macBook pro (2.4GHz Core i7) with 8gb of RAM.

… Mavericks memory compression is awesome. With 8 GB, I now run:
- Parallels with Win 7
- Visual Studio 2012
- IIS (dev web server)
- Firefox
- Chrome/Safari (now Safari because it seems vastly superior)
- iTunes
- Fireworks (Adobe product like Photoshop)
- etc

And my page outs have gone from huge with Lion, to almost zero with Mavericks. I think that's pretty impressive!…

I see the ultra brief beach balls as well, normally when I'm in parallels and ram utilization is high (8gb early 2013 13" rmbp). Wondering if it might be memory compression at work but not sure.

If you're having trouble with memory not freeing itself you can always open Terminal and type

sudo purge

I usually say, purge should be used only as part of a diagnostic routine ("… to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis …"), or words to that effect.

However, if (a not yet known version of) Parallels on Mavericks is not making optimal use of memory … go ahead, as an exception, try it.

It's normal to have some trivial amount of swap, even with oodles of RAM. Here's my current state with the system up for 24 hours. I don't know why yours is higher, but maybe you did something earlier that pushed it up a bit.



I like Mavericks memory management. Mavericks pretty much holds onto whatever it can in the File Cache, which freaks a lot of folks out, but it makes sense to use the RAM if it can. Why purge something I'm not using at the moment, but used a few hours ago. I might use that program or file again. But if I open a Parallels VM to which I've assigned 8GB of RAM, it'll purge whatever it needs from the cache to make room.

Bro if you don't free up some ramz your system is going to crash. …

… normal. The OS will use more RAM if the system has more RAM. …

Unused RAM is wasted RAM, so you should be glad that the OS is using the memory. When you spin up some VMs and actually uses all 16GB with application processes, the OS will delegate and handle it, ie hand over most available memory to the applications as opposed to hogging it for system use. If in this case you still see the system hogging a lot of RAM then it becomes an issue, but I don't think I've seen this happen on OS X.

Chrome and Parallels can cause some memory problems. This is not a problem of Mavericks.

… and quote:

"Do I need more swap?

No, disk caching only borrows the ram that applications don't currently want. It will not use swap. If applications want more memory, they just take it back from the disk cache. They will not start swapping." …

… arstechnica summary of how Mavericks handles memory?

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory

We really need a sticky …

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1660897/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1658542/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1661453/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1659440/

There are dozens of these..

16 days 22 hour uptime since 10.9 upgrade. 10.9 experience

Quite solid, I got a bunch of applications open, memory compression at 1.17GB on a 16GB Mac Mini i7 fusion drive model.

Stuff like Aperture,pixelmator, music stuff, Citrix Receiver 11.6, java apps,Parallels 9 running an Windows 7 VM Trading applications (ie Bloomberg Anywhere ,GSET on the VM,etc..) Stuff on the Nix side.

Anyhow definitely fast as well I do not notice any performance issues, but the Mac Mini is faster after the upgrade which I suspect is due to the way the HD4000 drivers were optimized and how Memory is now handled.

… tons of Safari tabs open. I never see the colored rainbow beachball anymore like I used to see it happen with 10.8

Mavericks memory management is amazing

I've noticed that my MBP is remarkably faster with Mavericks. I upgraded to 16GB of RAM when I had Mountain Lion but for some reason, I didn't see a whole lot of improvement over 4GB. I was still using swap. I did at times have a lot of stuff running like Parallels VMs. I agree that the memory management in Mavericks rocks. My MBP screams now.

 

[vexorg]

Which version of Parallels?

10.0.2, had to upgrade going to mavericks. Parallels it's self is fine as once it does start then it has enough memory.

Safari on the other hand hangs with the beach ball / pin wheel runs for ages if I sometimes open a new tab, or pick a new page.