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Snow Leopard = bloated?

M

mark28

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 29, 2010
1,632
2
So after startup it uses 2 gb of Ram. Some people say that Snow Leopard releases this RAM when needed, this however is not true.

If I run VMware and an App, the RAM is full and it starts using the disk. Why on earth does Snow Leopard drain 2 GB of RAM. It's ridiculous.

( VMware is limited to 1 gb and the App also uses 1 gb, so 2 gb in total ).

I got 4 gb of memory btw.

I wouldn't dare running Snow Leopard with only 1 GB of Ram, something Windows 7 does with no problems at all.
 
Currently I'm using 1.6GB of my 4GB and Safari is taking 400MB of that. Menu Bar and Dashboard are also full of stuff
 
Weird, OS X uses so much RAM on my MAC, it's very easy to get it full.

Safari is also an other memory hog which I tend to avoid.

The only startup item I have is gfxstatus btw which doesn't take up RAM at all.
 
kresh said:
Have you tried iFreeMem after a fresh reboot to see if it releases any inactive memory.

On my iMac (8,1) Snow Leopard uses about 1.1 GB and that is including SMCFanControl, Little Snitch, iStat, Espionage's daemon named iSpy, iTunes Helper and a few others as well.
Click to expand...

I'll try that out when I restart OS X again. I can only dream of such low RAM usages :p
 
I have 2gb of RAM. No problems. I don't run any virtual machines, but I run some pretty RAM consuming programs and games with no slowdown or problems.
 
kresh said:
Have you tried iFreeMem after a fresh reboot to see if it releases any inactive memory.
Click to expand...

Apps like iFreeMem are meant so that you don't have to reboot. Rebooting frees the ram, so running iFreeMem directly afterwards will have close to no effect at all.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

As far as I know the system will always try to use most of the ram, to improve speed. So, the more you have the more it will use.

You can put as much ram as you want in your computer, but if it's not being used, it's pretty useless.
 
Unused memory is wasted memory.

OS X knows better than you what it needs and how to deal with those amounts of RAM that are common today.

Programms like iFreeMem just mess up thats system, because they take huge amounts of RAM and force the OS to page stuff to disk that just should not go there.
 
It will use as much RAM as you give it - to a point. That doesn't mean it desperately needs it. It just takes advantage of the resources if they are available.
 
treichert said:
Unused memory is wasted memory.

OS X knows better than you what it needs and how to deal with those amounts of RAM that are common today.

Programms like iFreeMem just mess up thats system, because they take huge amounts of RAM and force the OS to page stuff to disk that just should not go there.
Click to expand...

+1. OSX is extremely memory efficient. More so than Windows 7. I won't go into detail why but if you program for both systems you will understand completely why I say that. (I'm not trying to start a flame war, its seriously true).

Something does not sound right with your system if indeed you are using 2GB of ram. Have you tried resetting the pram? Also make sure you are adding free memory AND inactive memory. That is your total free memory.
 
While it is true that RAM is there to serve a purpose and it cannot if you don't use it, many modern Apps and those of Apple more than others need insane amounts of RAM for the features they provide. Even if you don't use those RAM consuming features at all.
I run on 4gigs and just with opening my usual working apps which do not handle, video or pictures and don't really conume that much RAM, I usually end up with only a little more than 1 gig or inactive or free RAM. That is really not much.
What is RapidSVN doing to need 45mb of RAM. It needs to remember a few list and display a simple document tree. That used to be possible with 2-3 mb of RAM. What does itunes to with close to 100mb. Even utorrent used to need 5-10mb and now it needs 25 with out even downloading anything just sitting there.

There is no denying that stuff is really bloated, because software developers feel like RAM is that abundant today that you don't need to worry about it anymore.
and iFreeMem don't help anything. All it apperantly does is to free inactive RAM that is free already it is not cleaned that is all. Every App can take advantage of this RAM if it needs it. Wired and Active RAM is a little bit much and that is the developers fault and Apples.
 
I have about 1 GB Active, .5 GB Wired, and I'm running Finder, PathFinder, Mail, Chrome, Adium, and TweetDeck. Not to mention a few background tasks such as QuickSilver, DropBox, and MenuMeters.

All in all, I would say it doesn't feel bloated at all. Of course, I've got 6 GB RAM, but still. Leopard was certainly worse than this. Under Leopard on my PBG4 w/ 2 GB RAM, I was using swap space as soon as the system booted.
 
My original-model Core Duo MacBook Pro had a maximum of 2GB, ran Snow Leopard, and I used VMs every day (usually just one at a time of course), allocating 1GB to 'em. So I'm rather certain your contention that SL consumes 2GB has got to be wrong.

Perhaps in a fully-stuffed late-model Mac with lots of RAM (such as my current early-2010 MBP with its 8GB RAM), Snow Leopard might load more of itself into RAM for swiftness and glory, since there's plenty to go around.

In any case, in my experience it's quite efficient and by no means a hog.
 
VMware =1 GB, App = 1GB, so VMware + App = 2 GB. Then, your Ram is full and you start to have Page outs.

But, you have 4 GB of Ram. 4 does not = 2, so how can your Ram be full? Does Activity Monitor only show 2 GB of Ram?

Unless you are stating the remaining 2 GB is all used up by Snow Leopard. Beyond the value allocated to VMware, the amount for Snow Leopard and the app seem way too high.

Both my machines have only 2 GB and I never get Page outs unless compiling Software on my old MacBook while doing other stuff as well. Even then it is not that bad.
 
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Vmware has this nasty habit of accessing/using the swap disks, even when there's ram. I suspect that if anything is causing the ram usage and/or performance issues, it will be that.
 
munkery said:
VMware =1 GB, App = 1GB, so VMware + App = 2 GB. Then, your Ram is full and you start to have Page outs.

But, you have 4 GB of Ram. 4 does not = 2, so how can your Ram be full? Does Activity Monitor only show 2 GB of Ram?

Unless you are stating the remaining 2 GB is all used up by Snow Leopard. Beyond the value allocated to VMware, the amount for Snow Leopard and the app seem way too high.

Both my machines have only 2 GB and I never get Page outs unless compiling Software on my old MacBook while doing other stuff as well. Even then it is not that bad.
Click to expand...

No, Activity Monitor shows 4 Gb of Ram. VMware + 1 good App and I'm out of Ram basically, no idea how you can do that with only 2 gb of RAM and get no page outs. :confused:

I managed to get the RAM usage after startup to 1.4 Gb which is an improvement of some sort.

I think i'll just format and do a clean install next weekend. If it doesn't help i'm going to pick up 8 Gb of Ram.

maflynn said:
Vmware has this nasty habit of accessing/using the swap disks, even when there's ram. I suspect that if anything is causing the ram usage and/or performance issues, it will be that.
Click to expand...

But my Ram is full at this point. I think it's really the limit of 4 Gb that is reached. Anyway, I managed to get the Ram usage down to 1.4 Gb which is still alot in my opinion.
 
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mark28 said:
No, Activity Monitor shows 4 Gb of Ram. VMware + 1 good App and I'm out of Ram basically, no idea how you can do that with only 2 gb of RAM and get no page outs. :confused:

I managed to get the RAM usage after startup to 1.4 Gb which is an improvement of some sort.
Click to expand...

Open Activity Monitor and set it to "All Processes, Heirarchical" to see what is using up all your resources.

My usage is at 1.3 GB using Safari and cron running clamscan.
 
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