Poor Memory Performance in Mavericks

[jordansvoice]

Anyone notice poor memory performance in Mavericks?

My primary music production computer is a 2013 Mac Mini with an SSD Drive, 16gb of memory. My fresh Mountain Lion install was doomed from the beginning, I won't get into that. But it's been usable and in production.

On this same Mac Mini, I installed a fresh copy of Mavericks on a different partition (same drive). However, I noticed that when loading audio sample libraries into memory - it seemed to take longer than I was used to with Mountain Lion.

So, I timed it. Loading the same libraries, into memory, it was taking 2-3 seconds longer in Mavericks than in my Mountain Lion install

I ran Xbench to further solidify my presumptions - and I was right. Poorer memory performance.

Screenshot below. Mavericks on the left, Mountain Lion on the right. Same Mac mini box.

Graphics tests were also better on ML versus Mavericks. But CPU and disk utilization were better on Mavericks.

Anyone experiencing similar issues or have any insight?

 

[SlCKB0Y]

So, I timed it. Loading the same libraries, into memory, it was taking 2-3 seconds longer in Mavericks than in my Mountain Lion install

How big are the libraries?

Anyway, it's not really relevant as RAM performance will never be the bottleneck in that situation.

 

[jordansvoice]

How big are the libraries?

Anyway, it's not really relevant as RAM performance will never be the bottleneck in that situation.

800mb - 1GB max.

How is RAM irrelevant when the samples are being, well, loaded into RAM?

 

[SlCKB0Y]

800mb - 1GB max.

How is RAM irrelevant when the samples are being, well, loaded into RAM?

Because of the extreme speed of RAM - I mean look at your numbers. Even the fastest consumer SSDs on the market can't push data fast enough that they will hit the performance limits of RAM in read operations....

With the speed of modern RAM, 2-3 seconds is an eternity. Now i'm not saying you aren't seeing this delay but I strongly doubt that it is due to RAM.

I think that the differences your benchmarks are showing are a result of the memory compression found in Mavericks.