Yeah, but its much better if your system doesn't have to resort to using inactive memory. Because if you don't use it then recently closed applications will be way faster if you choose to open them up again.
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Why is OS X memory management so terrible?
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Yeah, but its much better if your system doesn't have to resort to using inactive memory. Because if you don't use it then recently closed applications will be way faster if you choose to open them up again.
Could the following be a possible explanation?
Supposedly, the system can become unresponsive when flushing the disk cache to release inactive memory.
https://ayaz.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/getting-back-inactive-memory-on-mac/
I suspect the same reduction in responsiveness occurs when OS X does this automatically.
Is it possible that you are often initiating the automatic flushing of the disk cache leading to reduced responsiveness because you use your system in a way that leaves very little free memory and bounce between apps at the threshold of needing to convert inactive memory to active memory for the apps in use?
Supposedly, Mac OS X was engineered to release inactive memory when launching a new application.
So, quitting the apps not essential to your workflow while playing WoW might be the only solution. This does not mean that the apps can't be used but the system might function better if the browser was given a clean start when needed and quit when unneeded while doing intensive activities to prevent this unresponsiveness.
This would explain your performance issues without an excessive amount of page outs.
Supposedly, the system can become unresponsive when flushing the disk cache to release inactive memory.
https://ayaz.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/getting-back-inactive-memory-on-mac/
I suspect the same reduction in responsiveness occurs when OS X does this automatically.
Is it possible that you are often initiating the automatic flushing of the disk cache leading to reduced responsiveness because you use your system in a way that leaves very little free memory and bounce between apps at the threshold of needing to convert inactive memory to active memory for the apps in use?
Supposedly, Mac OS X was engineered to release inactive memory when launching a new application.
So, quitting the apps not essential to your workflow while playing WoW might be the only solution. This does not mean that the apps can't be used but the system might function better if the browser was given a clean start when needed and quit when unneeded while doing intensive activities to prevent this unresponsiveness.
This would explain your performance issues without an excessive amount of page outs.
Hello there, all I can suggest you is to downgrade to snow leopard.
I have a late 2008 imac (3,06 ghz core 2duo, geforce 8800, 4gb ram).
Under snow leopard, this machine can handle World of Warcraft nearly maxed at 60+ fps stable with several applications running in background.
I've used this computer for production since its purchase, wich came with Leopard 10.5.4. With OSX Lion is no longer a production machine because of poor memory management.
It reserve a ridicolous amount of memory for apple applications such as mail, preview, textedit, and safari. On a fresh boot 2,5 gb of ram were used (wired, active) while on SL it sits around 800mb/1gb.
I'm barely able to launch a render with Maya or blender or After effects because most of the memory is used with only one application running with a a light project loaded.
Under snow leopard that's another story. I'm able to jump from Maya to Mudbox and photoshop with fairly large documents without issues.
I've used lion on this machine on a separate partition since the first developer preview, till the most recent developer seed of 10.7.2 so my experience is not based on a few hours/days of tests, I used as it was a production environment for application benchmarking.
I also have a macbook pro 2011 2,2 ghz with 8gb installed. I've tried lion on this machine just to see how it handled big maya scenes. Just for launching a render lion begins to page memory and sometimes it crashes because there's not enough memory available. Making a simulation cache is a guaranteed beachball hell because of less ram available and i sit around with 3-4gb of inactive ram. Only maya was running at the time. On snow leopard, everything is fine, with photoshop running as well as itunes while working on maya, and the OS clear the inactive ram used for cache as intended.
screenshot of activity monitor of the 2008 imac. Playing wow with several applications open in background without problems. SnowLeopard 10.6.8, safari downgraded to 5.0.5. Inactive ram reserved by photoshop.
![exp2k.png]()
I have a late 2008 imac (3,06 ghz core 2duo, geforce 8800, 4gb ram).
Under snow leopard, this machine can handle World of Warcraft nearly maxed at 60+ fps stable with several applications running in background.
I've used this computer for production since its purchase, wich came with Leopard 10.5.4. With OSX Lion is no longer a production machine because of poor memory management.
It reserve a ridicolous amount of memory for apple applications such as mail, preview, textedit, and safari. On a fresh boot 2,5 gb of ram were used (wired, active) while on SL it sits around 800mb/1gb.
I'm barely able to launch a render with Maya or blender or After effects because most of the memory is used with only one application running with a a light project loaded.
Under snow leopard that's another story. I'm able to jump from Maya to Mudbox and photoshop with fairly large documents without issues.
I've used lion on this machine on a separate partition since the first developer preview, till the most recent developer seed of 10.7.2 so my experience is not based on a few hours/days of tests, I used as it was a production environment for application benchmarking.
I also have a macbook pro 2011 2,2 ghz with 8gb installed. I've tried lion on this machine just to see how it handled big maya scenes. Just for launching a render lion begins to page memory and sometimes it crashes because there's not enough memory available. Making a simulation cache is a guaranteed beachball hell because of less ram available and i sit around with 3-4gb of inactive ram. Only maya was running at the time. On snow leopard, everything is fine, with photoshop running as well as itunes while working on maya, and the OS clear the inactive ram used for cache as intended.
screenshot of activity monitor of the 2008 imac. Playing wow with several applications open in background without problems. SnowLeopard 10.6.8, safari downgraded to 5.0.5. Inactive ram reserved by photoshop.
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Excuse I couldn't read the whole thread before posting, I've got tears in my eyes from the first 15 posts and I fear to lose my will to live if I read further.. (@ that "linux troll": please google "ubuntu how to set up swap")
munkery is all right about whats the problem:
Well, the whole problem is how os x is designed to handle RAM. The philosophy here is simply: use whats there, and free up once space is needed for something else. So your inactive ram is what you closed and don't need right now, but it's kept for better days. If it's not touched for x seconds or what it's dismissed totally, but afaik that takes indeed a while.
As long as what you're doing is mail, surfing and music you wont give a ****, and this philosophy might even be beneficial, since closing itunes now and launching it in 5 minutes again is faster that way.
Once your ram is fully "used" and you need more free ram the swapping begins. And it swaps like exactly what is necessary, no more.
If its a program that demands x free ram when starting it, it's freed up and done, you probably wont notice.
If its a game like wow that demands x at start and after that x small bits while loading more stuff you'll end up swapping endlessly, since os x frees up whats needed instead of dismissing a bigger chunk of inactive ram.
Swapping to a hard drive is by definition slow and the only way to avoid your game being slowed down to 0 fps while the swapping process is writing to your hard drive, is close anything that unnecessarily is eating ram, purge your inactive ram and start your game.
In Snow Leopard I tried a workaround that involved killing the whole swapping process and replacing it with a custom process that dismisses all inactive ram instead of writing it to the swap file. Can't recommend that as it caused a whole set of new problems. The pause/resume feature has no impact, as it doesn't turn off swapping in general.
As far as I know purge is the only "fix" available
munkery is all right about whats the problem:
Well, the whole problem is how os x is designed to handle RAM. The philosophy here is simply: use whats there, and free up once space is needed for something else. So your inactive ram is what you closed and don't need right now, but it's kept for better days. If it's not touched for x seconds or what it's dismissed totally, but afaik that takes indeed a while.
As long as what you're doing is mail, surfing and music you wont give a ****, and this philosophy might even be beneficial, since closing itunes now and launching it in 5 minutes again is faster that way.
Once your ram is fully "used" and you need more free ram the swapping begins. And it swaps like exactly what is necessary, no more.
If its a program that demands x free ram when starting it, it's freed up and done, you probably wont notice.
If its a game like wow that demands x at start and after that x small bits while loading more stuff you'll end up swapping endlessly, since os x frees up whats needed instead of dismissing a bigger chunk of inactive ram.
Swapping to a hard drive is by definition slow and the only way to avoid your game being slowed down to 0 fps while the swapping process is writing to your hard drive, is close anything that unnecessarily is eating ram, purge your inactive ram and start your game.
In Snow Leopard I tried a workaround that involved killing the whole swapping process and replacing it with a custom process that dismisses all inactive ram instead of writing it to the swap file. Can't recommend that as it caused a whole set of new problems. The pause/resume feature has no impact, as it doesn't turn off swapping in general.
As far as I know purge is the only "fix" available
Thanks for the responses guys. Looks like I'm screwed as far as actual fixes though. It's discouraging that OS X has become so inefficient when it comes to resource management while Windows has done the exact opposite. I honestly like OS X much more than Microsoft's OS, but this sort of stuff REALLY bothers me. Maybe 10.7 would work properly with 32GB of RAM installed, but even then I'd still have my doubts. I pray they fix these issues before 10.8
I now have only 5 programs open (Firefox, Mail, iTunes, µTorrent, Chrome) and my system is exceedingly slow. Took a good 30 seconds to open TEXT EDIT. Opened up Activity Monitor, and sure enough, next to zero CPU, Disk, Network Usage, but all of my RAM being used by God-knows-what.
Now some real examples of the problem:
Taken last night at around 2AM:
![]()
NOTHING open but somehow just over 1GB of free RAM. Not a problem, right? Well, I reopened a few programs, and let my computer idle overnight. Didn't use my computer once all day. Opened Activity Monitor up at 7 this evening:
![]()
22GB worth of paging from a day and a half of idling.
After 2 hours more of internet browsing Amazon, Ebay, and this site:
![]()
I now have only 5 programs open (Firefox, Mail, iTunes, µTorrent, Chrome) and my system is exceedingly slow. Took a good 30 seconds to open TEXT EDIT. Opened up Activity Monitor, and sure enough, next to zero CPU, Disk, Network Usage, but all of my RAM being used by God-knows-what.
Now some real examples of the problem:
Taken last night at around 2AM:
NOTHING open but somehow just over 1GB of free RAM. Not a problem, right? Well, I reopened a few programs, and let my computer idle overnight. Didn't use my computer once all day. Opened Activity Monitor up at 7 this evening:
22GB worth of paging from a day and a half of idling.
After 2 hours more of internet browsing Amazon, Ebay, and this site:
Sorry mate, but it's still not paging out.
Meaning the memory and the memory subsystem is doing it's job.
As for a comment you made earlier about "Your not a heavy multitasked" to someone.
Well I do heavily multi-task, and what your doing is frankly not heavily multitasking:
I run VMWare Fusion set to give Windows 7 x64 4GB on both my 8GB MBP and 12GB Mac Pro.
On the Mac Pro it also runs Safari, Lightroom, Photoshop, Indesign, Mail, iChat, iTunes, and all the other random background tasks associated with my workflow and... I very occasionally get page outs on the Mac Pro and absolutely NO slow downs at ALL.
I get page outs on the MacBook Pro because when you assign 4GB to Windows, about 5GB in total is used.
Whatever your problems are, it's not down to the memory.
Just to prove that I've opened up every app I have on my MBP, the page outs are flying up [meaning the physical memory is pretty much full] and.. text edit opens immediately.
Meaning the memory and the memory subsystem is doing it's job.
As for a comment you made earlier about "Your not a heavy multitasked" to someone.
Well I do heavily multi-task, and what your doing is frankly not heavily multitasking:
I run VMWare Fusion set to give Windows 7 x64 4GB on both my 8GB MBP and 12GB Mac Pro.
On the Mac Pro it also runs Safari, Lightroom, Photoshop, Indesign, Mail, iChat, iTunes, and all the other random background tasks associated with my workflow and... I very occasionally get page outs on the Mac Pro and absolutely NO slow downs at ALL.
I get page outs on the MacBook Pro because when you assign 4GB to Windows, about 5GB in total is used.
Whatever your problems are, it's not down to the memory.
Just to prove that I've opened up every app I have on my MBP, the page outs are flying up [meaning the physical memory is pretty much full] and.. text edit opens immediately.
The problem is called memory leakage. Software in every OS has memory leakage.
Memory leakage is bocoming noticable on your system because you are leaving the programs idle overnight instead of quitting the apps.
This issue is less apparent in Windows because apps quit when closed in Windows.
Memory leakage is a common reason for BSOD in Windows.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/979444/
Firefox is known for having memory leaks.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/07/mozilla-plugs-firefox-memory-leak-issues/
The solution to this problem as mentioned several times already in this thread is to quit apps when not being used for extended periods of time.
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Running Fusion I've no problems, too, until my HDD becomes the bottleneck even without swapping. Hanging at 8 of 8 GB RAM used aint no poblem, until I'd quit VMWare, Eclipse and so on, technically releasing about 5GB of RAM and start a game like Starcraft 2. It loads forever, once its up and you start a game its frequently dropping to 0 fps. Keeping an eye on the activity monitor it's easy to see: swapping == 0 fps.
I certainly think this is indeed a problem of memory management design.
Quitting VMWare, run purge, start the game and everything is fine.
This is what we do.
Quitting apps doesn't release their ram unless it's needed for something else.
Outcome: swapping while loading/running the app that needs more ram than currently available
Issue? Swapping equals unresponsive System.
Fix? Nothing but release unused by still inactive memory yourself by purging.
I'd me more concerned with the kernal task taking a gig or so and shockwave player taking 600mb over the mail app taking 115mb
Since many people here seem convinced this isn't a memory problem, can somebody explain to me why this problem only occurs when I have no free memory, and why the purge command is the only thing short of a restart that fixes this?
Other users report having the same issue too, so I'm obviously not making this up..
As far as any comment's I've made concerning others' multitasking, the only thing I've said is that launching 30 applications and observing that you have 5gig of wired RAM, ignoring the rest of my situation, and stating there is no problem isn't too helpful.
And as gamma stated, quitting applications doesn't solve anything as it only released wired memory, which isn't the issue. Purge is hardly a fix either as it defeats the entire purpose of the OS's memory management system and defeats any point in having installed an extra 4GB of RAM. Many things should indeed be cached in RAM in the form of "active" or "inactive" memory, but the OS should be able to intelligently release that memory as needed without the user entering a terminal command to manually release ALL cached memory. Most OS's have been doing a fine job at automatically doing this for the past 2 decades, so I'm at a loss why the "world's most advanced operating system" today, can't.
And paging in is a sign that I don't have enough memory. If you don't believe me, please reconsider. When the OS hasn't yet devoured all of the available memory, I've let these applications sit open and idle for up to a week, and the result is what you saw in my very first post. Negligible paging, in the magnitude of a few hundred megabytes. When all my memory is used, regardless of any and all other factors, I see paging in the TENS OF THOUSANDS of megabytes over just 8 hours. If you still say this isn't a memory issue, I'm not sure what else I can say.
Just because your experience with professional audio/video tools hasn't revealed these same faults with the OS doesn't mean they don't exist. Professional audio/video editing tools work very differently and manage memory very very differently than games. These comments aren't directed at any specific person, but I'm fed up with various people telling me that memory isn't my issue when I've already isolated it as the sole cause of my problems and established that memory management in this operating system does not work as it should in order for users, such as myself, who do nothing unusual or that requires inordinate amounts of memory, to use the OS properly.
Other users report having the same issue too, so I'm obviously not making this up..
As far as any comment's I've made concerning others' multitasking, the only thing I've said is that launching 30 applications and observing that you have 5gig of wired RAM, ignoring the rest of my situation, and stating there is no problem isn't too helpful.
And as gamma stated, quitting applications doesn't solve anything as it only released wired memory, which isn't the issue. Purge is hardly a fix either as it defeats the entire purpose of the OS's memory management system and defeats any point in having installed an extra 4GB of RAM. Many things should indeed be cached in RAM in the form of "active" or "inactive" memory, but the OS should be able to intelligently release that memory as needed without the user entering a terminal command to manually release ALL cached memory. Most OS's have been doing a fine job at automatically doing this for the past 2 decades, so I'm at a loss why the "world's most advanced operating system" today, can't.
And paging in is a sign that I don't have enough memory. If you don't believe me, please reconsider. When the OS hasn't yet devoured all of the available memory, I've let these applications sit open and idle for up to a week, and the result is what you saw in my very first post. Negligible paging, in the magnitude of a few hundred megabytes. When all my memory is used, regardless of any and all other factors, I see paging in the TENS OF THOUSANDS of megabytes over just 8 hours. If you still say this isn't a memory issue, I'm not sure what else I can say.
Just because your experience with professional audio/video tools hasn't revealed these same faults with the OS doesn't mean they don't exist. Professional audio/video editing tools work very differently and manage memory very very differently than games. These comments aren't directed at any specific person, but I'm fed up with various people telling me that memory isn't my issue when I've already isolated it as the sole cause of my problems and established that memory management in this operating system does not work as it should in order for users, such as myself, who do nothing unusual or that requires inordinate amounts of memory, to use the OS properly.
Memory leakage contributes to increases in all types of memory except free memory.
If you don't let apps idle causing memory leakage to build up, then inactive memory is properly managed.
For example,
This shows OS X memory management working properly. The amount of free memory stays roughly the same while inactive memory is released for other processes. Memory leaks will continually eat up all the extra resources to the point where memory management doesn't work properly.
My machine only has 2 GB and I never have any issues playing games including online MMORPGs such as WoW.
As you mentioned, professional apps have much better memory management than other apps given that these apps need to meet the productivity demands of the individuals that use the apps.
But, there are certain types of apps that are prone to memory leaks often because the memory leakage improves the performance of the app unless the app is used in a manner where the memory leakage causes issues, such as leaving the apps idle.
Browsers are one type of app that are prone to memory leaks and the majority of the apps that you're leaving idle are either browsers or apps based on browsers.
For example,
Firefox = browser, known for having memory leak issues
http://onsoftware.en.softonic.com/does-firefox-7-solve-the-memory-leak-problem
Chrome = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
Mail = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
iTunes = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
http://www.webkit.org/quality/leakhunting.html
http://onsoftware.en.softonic.com/does-firefox-7-solve-the-memory-leak-problem
Chrome = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
Mail = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
iTunes = based on WebKit (same foundation as Safari)
http://www.webkit.org/quality/leakhunting.html
Using these apps while gaming isn't an issue but leaving them idle for days is an issue. Completely shut down these apps when not used for extended periods.
I can't get my system to behave like yours. Six days uptime, more multitasking than you do...
I think Safari might be your problem? Have you tried a different browser?
When I load up on programs, once they are closed my memory turns back into free memory, not inactive memory. I am sitting here now with 2.8GB free mem, ~1GB inactive memory.
I think Safari might be your problem? Have you tried a different browser?
When I load up on programs, once they are closed my memory turns back into free memory, not inactive memory. I am sitting here now with 2.8GB free mem, ~1GB inactive memory.
I can't get my system to behave like yours. Six days uptime, more multitasking than you do...
I think Safari might be your problem? Have you tried a different browser?
When I load up on programs, once they are closed my memory turns back into free memory, not inactive memory. I am sitting here now with 2.8GB free mem, ~1GB inactive memory.
The OP uses Firefox and Chrome not Safari.
If you are replying to me, my system is working normally.
After a long enough duration (a few minutes), active memory will be released into free memory.
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Page in is data being copied in to the RAM. When you run out of RAM, you copy data out which is why you look at the page outs.
I am not denying that you have a problem, something is definitely wrong. What I think is getting everyone upset is that you're attacking the OS which seems to be working for everybody else, me included.:
You don't appear to be pushing your computer very hard but are experiencing problems that much heavier users don't see. Have you considered possibility that the problem is with your particular computer?
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Yes I see what you're saying, but if firefox being a memory hog and leaking memory was my problem, shouldn't quitting firefox and relaunching it fix this? Because in my case it doesn't, as you can see from the fact that I have under 2GB free RAM with nothing open. As I've stated before, I've had the '08 iMac downstairs (running 10.6) up for a few months straight and seen basically no memory leakage whatsoever that doesn't resolve itself after quitting the application or logging out.
This is why I'm skeptical that firefox memory leaks (or any one specific application for that matter), are actually my issue. I was under the impression that using the purge command released memory in much the same way as quitting the application does (ie forcing garbage collection). The difference is that purge effects memory used by all system process whereas quitting firefox only effects memory in use by firefox. This leads me to believe that it is either the OS in general is suffering from memory issues, or that the OS isn't allowing applications to release their memory when quit the way they have historically, or a combination of the two. I've seen this issue with just about every application installed on my computer, including VLC, Mail, Firefox, iTunes, Chrome etc.
Yes memory leaks could be an issue, but I'm nearly positive they aren't the issue.
The automatic memory garbage collection isn't instant. It takes a few minutes and it takes even longer if your memory is saturated via memory leaks.
I allowed leakage to persist on a system to observe the effects. Sometimes the effects persist after apps are quit because other default functions of OS X (cron, indexing, & etc) are interfered with when the memory is saturated via memory leaks. Once the memory is freed, it is then allocated to those default tasks until the tasks are completed.
Also, if one computer running OS X has the issue and another computer running OS X doesn't have the issue, Then it makes sense that the problem is not the OS.
It is possible that there is an actual issue with the RAM itself.
Can you offer any other explanation for why my computer would act identically to a memory starved machine when it has <50MB free RAM, but acts fine when it has at least 150MB free RAM, while all other factors remain constant? There is no other plausible explanation. I'm not here to waste my time, or anybody else's, by further disputing whether memory is my issue.. this has already been established beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pushing my computer very hard." No, I'm not running 3 versions of windows, linux, and Mac OS X inside a virtual machine while I maxing out my CPU encoding videos and hosting a server that I'm playing WoW on. I am pushing my machine pretty hard (beyond it's limits apparently?) when it comes to multitasking, running multiple programs, etc. Could you elaborate on that statement a bit?
And I don't believe this is an issue with my particular machine either. A few other users have posted here reporting the same or similar issues with games. I've had this computer for a few months now, and have had these issues since day 1 with the 4GB of apple installed RAM, and now with 8GB of aftermarket RAM. At first my thoughts were "Hmm, this new OS must require more RAM. 4GB was plenty back when 10.5 was current, but I guess 10.7 just needs more." Not unreasonable I didn't think for 4 years progress. But I'm now a few pennies shorter and don't see any improvement at all. If you gave me 2 identical machines, one with 4GB and one with 8GB, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference without going to the System Profiler or Activity Monitor. But no, I don't think my machine is defective.
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I restarted my machine today for updates, so I'm not having any issues yet. But one I start having issues, I'll try your suggestion and wait a few hours after quitting my apps to see if the problem resolves itself.
The other machine is running 10.6 (Snow Leopard), this is running 10.7, aka Lion. And I do believe this problem is new in Lion, which is a theory supported by input from others experiencing similar issues in this thread.
See previous post concerning physical issues with my computer.
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My memory issues seem to take a bit longer before they become problematic, but otherwise no. With 8GB installed, I run out of memory in about a day, maybe two depending on usage. Whereas before upgrading it took maybe half a day's worth of browsing the internet, watching movies, etc.
If you don't let apps idle when not in use, then you won't have the issue.
Why not just avoid the issue in the first place?
The system upon which I let memory leakage occur was running Leopard.
Memory leakage will become an issue on any OS if the app in use has a memory leak, such as Firefox.
Now that surprises me. When my machine first arrived with 4GB, I was running out of memory and it was sluggish at times because of this. A week later my 8GB arrived and I installed it. The difference was immediate and enormous.
What kind of RAM did you buy?