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Why is OS X memory management so terrible?
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231295
If you read through the reviews there are dozens of Mac users that installed the same memory and it works quite fine. Booted in Windows and ran memtest just to be sure everything was good, and everything checked out. My computer was really just fine with 4GB, aside from when I ran out of memory, usually after about a day of uptime (2 days with light use, with "light" being a relative term). After that my computer acted sluggish. Now with the new 8GB of RAM, I usually have around 1GB free at all times without WoW open. I've completely run out of RAM twice without WoW open in the 3 weeks since I upgraded, and a purge fixed this. Then again, I usually end up purging before my RAM is totally consumed, as I can't play WoW with less than a gig free anyway.
So yeah has made a difference, but hasn't solved my problem. It's merely extended how long I can survive without purging.
But also note that I only owned the computer for a few weeks before upgrading the RAM, and it's possible this wasn't long enough to notice any sluggishness and that the continuing annoying issues made me oblivious to any improvements.
No, the machine came with Lion installed. I'm pretty sure that after a fresh restart, my kernel uses around 600-700MB, slowly increasing to at most 950MB and holding there. I believe the kernel in Lion is designed to use more memory if there is more available. If I remove one of the 4GB chips, I'm pretty sure it would go down to around 600MB.
If you read through the reviews there are dozens of Mac users that installed the same memory and it works quite fine. Booted in Windows and ran memtest just to be sure everything was good, and everything checked out. My computer was really just fine with 4GB, aside from when I ran out of memory, usually after about a day of uptime (2 days with light use, with "light" being a relative term). After that my computer acted sluggish. Now with the new 8GB of RAM, I usually have around 1GB free at all times without WoW open. I've completely run out of RAM twice without WoW open in the 3 weeks since I upgraded, and a purge fixed this. Then again, I usually end up purging before my RAM is totally consumed, as I can't play WoW with less than a gig free anyway.
So yeah has made a difference, but hasn't solved my problem. It's merely extended how long I can survive without purging.
But also note that I only owned the computer for a few weeks before upgrading the RAM, and it's possible this wasn't long enough to notice any sluggishness and that the continuing annoying issues made me oblivious to any improvements.
No, the machine came with Lion installed. I'm pretty sure that after a fresh restart, my kernel uses around 600-700MB, slowly increasing to at most 950MB and holding there. I believe the kernel in Lion is designed to use more memory if there is more available. If I remove one of the 4GB chips, I'm pretty sure it would go down to around 600MB.
I started WoW with 50mb free and 2.3GB inactive, and it didn't hang at all. The game appears to have pulled the memory from inactive. Now I've quit WoW. All the RAM that WoW used is free now, not inactive. So now Activity Monitor says I have ~750mb free and ~1.67mb inactive.
You say when you do this, the game hangs and doesn't pull RAM from Inactive, right?
You say when you do this, the game hangs and doesn't pull RAM from Inactive, right?
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I probably should have explained this all out from the start, but I guess I'll do it now.
I'll start by clarifying a point I made earlier. When I say that games are very different in their workings from professional video tools, I wasn't referring to RAM efficiency, memory leaks, etc. I was talking about the fundamental differences in the way, say, Premiere and World of Warcraft utilize the RAM and the HDD while being used.
The game launches fine, it only needs 500MB to launch to the login screen which it seems able to pull from inactive quite well. Login and to get to the character selection screen, the game queries the OS for another 200MB of RAM from inactive. All good so far. Press the "Enter World" button and the load screen starts. If you watch the Activity Monitor, everything seems fine. The system sits at about 25MB free RAM, and as the game loads, you can watch the memory used by the game increase 20MB at a time up to about 1.1GB when the loading screen finishes. I'm now sitting in the game, and everything seems fine. But every time you move, change the camera angle, or do anything that changes what you see on your screen, the game drops to 0 fps, making the game unplayable until you stop.
What is happening is the game is trying to read textures and such from the HDD, which slows the game to a near-standstill. Normally this information is loaded from the HDD to the RAM, and is then available very quickly whenever that texture is needed again.
I'll give an example. In the game, I'm standing still my camera is aiming at a brick wall. The texture for that brick wall is loaded into the RAM, where it can be read very quickly. My video card reads that data and renders it into what I observe as a brick wall, and it does this at a rate of 60 times per second. Now I turn my camera around, and I'm now looking at a dirt path with flowers. The game looks for the dirt and flower textures in the specified folder on my HDD. It loads this data into the RAM, where it is read and rendered by my video card. Seeking and reading from the HDD is fairly slow, so I experience a bit of "jerkyness" as this data is written into the RAM. Normally the brick wall, flower, and dirt textures are kept in the RAM indefinitely (or at least until I go through a loading screen) so when I turn my camera back to the brick wall, the brick wall texture is available almost instantly from the RAM. The HDD isn't even involved in the process. But in my case I have a mere 20MB of free RAM (and here is where the OS views "free" and "inactive" RAM differently).So I log into the game, and the brick wall texture is loaded into the RAM, where the gpu is able to render it. But as soon as I turn my camera around, the game needs to load the dirt and flower textures, each of which take up another 20MB of RAM. So in order for to make room for these two textures, the data for the brick wall textures is erased from my RAM. When I next turn my camera back to the brick wall, instead of the brick wall texture being immediately ready in the RAM, the system has to seek and read it from the HDD, and write that data back to my RAM, during which time my game drops to 0fps again. Every other modern OS would simply erase a 50MB chunk of RAM (from firefox for example) that is actually inactive, and then use that free space for WoW textures. For some reason Lion seems to throw these unused textures from WoW into the same category as an unused .jpg avatar file from a forum I visited 2 days ago, and for some reason chooses to erase the WoW textures over the .jpg file. One would think that closing Firefox would release the data from that .jpg file (as it does in every single other OS I've ever used), but it doesn't. The only way to erase that data from the RAM is to use purge, which clears all data, even that which shouldn't be cleared.
That is the issue here. Not CPU load. Not network utilization. Not any error on my part. Not any defect in my physical hardware or my software (though many would consider this idiotic implementation of memory management a software defect). It is a fundamental flaw in the way Apple has designed their software to handle random access memory. And the only logical explanation I have for this is that by keeping every single bit of information accessed over the course of a few days of browsing ready for immediate access in the RAM, they can artificially increase the snappiness of their OS for the majority of users. When Safari launches in 1 second flat instead of the 4 seconds it used to take, or loads webpages 2x faster than it used to, that's because most of the data needed is already stored in the RAM. Apple seems to call this progress. I'm not sure what to call it. But when a decent majority of the userbase is forced to restart their computers every 3 days because the system starts to become unresponsive, I sure as hell don't call that progress. OSX is loading as much data as possible into RAM to make the system seem faster for a brief period of time, rather than intelligently loading vital application/system data and intelligently purging data that isn't needed so that the system runs smoothly for an extended period of time. If the engineers who designed the OS on this computer aren't smart enough to figure that one out, I'm seriously starting to doubt why I don't just boot into windows as my primary system all the time.
I'll start by clarifying a point I made earlier. When I say that games are very different in their workings from professional video tools, I wasn't referring to RAM efficiency, memory leaks, etc. I was talking about the fundamental differences in the way, say, Premiere and World of Warcraft utilize the RAM and the HDD while being used.
The game launches fine, it only needs 500MB to launch to the login screen which it seems able to pull from inactive quite well. Login and to get to the character selection screen, the game queries the OS for another 200MB of RAM from inactive. All good so far. Press the "Enter World" button and the load screen starts. If you watch the Activity Monitor, everything seems fine. The system sits at about 25MB free RAM, and as the game loads, you can watch the memory used by the game increase 20MB at a time up to about 1.1GB when the loading screen finishes. I'm now sitting in the game, and everything seems fine. But every time you move, change the camera angle, or do anything that changes what you see on your screen, the game drops to 0 fps, making the game unplayable until you stop.
What is happening is the game is trying to read textures and such from the HDD, which slows the game to a near-standstill. Normally this information is loaded from the HDD to the RAM, and is then available very quickly whenever that texture is needed again.
I'll give an example. In the game, I'm standing still my camera is aiming at a brick wall. The texture for that brick wall is loaded into the RAM, where it can be read very quickly. My video card reads that data and renders it into what I observe as a brick wall, and it does this at a rate of 60 times per second. Now I turn my camera around, and I'm now looking at a dirt path with flowers. The game looks for the dirt and flower textures in the specified folder on my HDD. It loads this data into the RAM, where it is read and rendered by my video card. Seeking and reading from the HDD is fairly slow, so I experience a bit of "jerkyness" as this data is written into the RAM. Normally the brick wall, flower, and dirt textures are kept in the RAM indefinitely (or at least until I go through a loading screen) so when I turn my camera back to the brick wall, the brick wall texture is available almost instantly from the RAM. The HDD isn't even involved in the process. But in my case I have a mere 20MB of free RAM (and here is where the OS views "free" and "inactive" RAM differently).So I log into the game, and the brick wall texture is loaded into the RAM, where the gpu is able to render it. But as soon as I turn my camera around, the game needs to load the dirt and flower textures, each of which take up another 20MB of RAM. So in order for to make room for these two textures, the data for the brick wall textures is erased from my RAM. When I next turn my camera back to the brick wall, instead of the brick wall texture being immediately ready in the RAM, the system has to seek and read it from the HDD, and write that data back to my RAM, during which time my game drops to 0fps again. Every other modern OS would simply erase a 50MB chunk of RAM (from firefox for example) that is actually inactive, and then use that free space for WoW textures. For some reason Lion seems to throw these unused textures from WoW into the same category as an unused .jpg avatar file from a forum I visited 2 days ago, and for some reason chooses to erase the WoW textures over the .jpg file. One would think that closing Firefox would release the data from that .jpg file (as it does in every single other OS I've ever used), but it doesn't. The only way to erase that data from the RAM is to use purge, which clears all data, even that which shouldn't be cleared.
That is the issue here. Not CPU load. Not network utilization. Not any error on my part. Not any defect in my physical hardware or my software (though many would consider this idiotic implementation of memory management a software defect). It is a fundamental flaw in the way Apple has designed their software to handle random access memory. And the only logical explanation I have for this is that by keeping every single bit of information accessed over the course of a few days of browsing ready for immediate access in the RAM, they can artificially increase the snappiness of their OS for the majority of users. When Safari launches in 1 second flat instead of the 4 seconds it used to take, or loads webpages 2x faster than it used to, that's because most of the data needed is already stored in the RAM. Apple seems to call this progress. I'm not sure what to call it. But when a decent majority of the userbase is forced to restart their computers every 3 days because the system starts to become unresponsive, I sure as hell don't call that progress. OSX is loading as much data as possible into RAM to make the system seem faster for a brief period of time, rather than intelligently loading vital application/system data and intelligently purging data that isn't needed so that the system runs smoothly for an extended period of time. If the engineers who designed the OS on this computer aren't smart enough to figure that one out, I'm seriously starting to doubt why I don't just boot into windows as my primary system all the time.
I appreciate how helpful a few of you have tried to be (munkery, among others), but a lot of this forum is like dealing with really bad tech support. "Is the network cable plugged in? Have you tried cycling your modem? Why don't you try again. The problem couldn't possibly be on our side."
I'm fairly certain I've found all the answers I could possibly find helpful here, and I thank everybody who has actually contributed or tried to be helpful in some way.
If anybody has any further suggestions that don't involve speculating that the cause of my problems are not memory related, stating that they've never experienced anything of the sort and don't see how there could be a problem, or suggesting that I have a defective machine or software that differs from that of anybody else, I'd be more than glad to listen.
I'm fairly certain I've found all the answers I could possibly find helpful here, and I thank everybody who has actually contributed or tried to be helpful in some way.
If anybody has any further suggestions that don't involve speculating that the cause of my problems are not memory related, stating that they've never experienced anything of the sort and don't see how there could be a problem, or suggesting that I have a defective machine or software that differs from that of anybody else, I'd be more than glad to listen.
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Or, if you don't let apps that are known to have memory leaks idle when not in use, then there is no issue.
Disclaimer: This reply isn't directed at the OP. It is directed at any other forum users that read this thread looking for a functional solution for dealing with preventable issues related to memory leaks in software.
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You most certainly are not running out of memory nor does it have anything to do with how OS X handles memory management. If you were running out of memory your Page Outs would be a huge number, and thus far in all your screenshots it is quite low as munkery advised. It's obvious there IS something wrong with your hardware or software, contrary to what you believe.
As it's a new machine and still covered by Apple Care, I'd take it in to an Apple Store.
As it's a new machine and still covered by Apple Care, I'd take it in to an Apple Store.
You know, if Mac OS memory management is really bad, we can't really do anything.
So why don't you go to apple support and ask them?
With same amount of program running, I agree that Mac OS requires more memory to experience the same snappiness. Based on my experience with Starcraft2, 4 gig with browsers open wasn't enough in Mac OS while running on Windows7 seemed ok.
I'm not so sure about what to blame though. It may certainly be due to the lack of efficient memory management of Mac OS. It may be due to Mac versioned applications being less efficient (or horrible at freeing up memory). Memory issue is not 100% dependent on OS side. and browsing flash heavy pages really take up resources in mac os where mac versioned flash tend to run horribly compared to Win version. You can simply compare the two by opening the same flash heavy page.
I'm not sure what kind of reply you are looking for.
Do you want us to acknowledge Mac OS's memory management?
So why don't you go to apple support and ask them?
With same amount of program running, I agree that Mac OS requires more memory to experience the same snappiness. Based on my experience with Starcraft2, 4 gig with browsers open wasn't enough in Mac OS while running on Windows7 seemed ok.
I'm not so sure about what to blame though. It may certainly be due to the lack of efficient memory management of Mac OS. It may be due to Mac versioned applications being less efficient (or horrible at freeing up memory). Memory issue is not 100% dependent on OS side. and browsing flash heavy pages really take up resources in mac os where mac versioned flash tend to run horribly compared to Win version. You can simply compare the two by opening the same flash heavy page.
I'm not sure what kind of reply you are looking for.
Do you want us to acknowledge Mac OS's memory management?
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No, there are no memory leaks here that are worth worrying about. Firefox does have memory leaks, but it doesn't leak 6GB of memory over 2 days. And those that do exist are resolved when quitting the application. This is memory being properly allocated by the OS, not leaked. For some reason, the OS just has issues "letting go" of the data stored in the RAM. Not to insult your intelligence, but I advise reading up on the difference between a memory leak and the system storing memory as intended. There is a big difference.
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The problem isn't as straight forward as it would seem from my explanation. I just didn't want to write a paper on how games manage their memory, and what I did write, I thought, got the general concept across fairly well. What you're suggesting is much more complicated than it sounds. And besides, what WoW is doing is what every developer should strive to make their applications do: be efficient. Every other OS out there works fine with the way this program handles it's memory, including every other iteration of Mac OS X.
So I disagree. Developers shouldn't have to make their programs less efficient to compensate for the system's lack of working memory management. Imagine if all your applications went around requesting 200 or 300MB more memory than they actually need "just in case." You would have no memory left!
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It's very disheartening to see how hard it is for some people to add 1+1 and get 2, or to even read the few short paragraphs written by the person they're replying to.
I'll say this one last time.
I only have problems when I have no free memory. Freeing up memory (via purge command, etc) is the only way to solve this problem. Please, continue to tell me memory isn't my issue. I'll be amused.
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After the first 2 pages, my main intent was to see if anybody else was having the same issue, and if anybody had found a work around that doesn't involve the purge command. Since at this point I've spoken to a number of people who do experience the same thing (and humorously a few people here are still trying to tell me this isn't memory related), as I hinted at in my last post, I'm still hoping for somebody to provide a solution. One user suggested Freemem via PM, which I appreciate, as it looks to be the best temporary fix for now.
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http://developer.apple.com/library/...onceptual/MemoryMgmt/Articles/MemoryMgmt.html
The only difference between active and inactive memory is how recently it has been accessed. This is managed via reference counting, such as ARC.
http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/mh/2011/06/20/p2571
Apps with memory leakage contribute to a growth in inactive memory due to the unused memory that can't be freed being marked as inactive memory because the memory is no longer being accessed.
The memory leakage also doesn't allow the inactive memory to be freed due to the inability to free that memory being the cause of the memory leakage.
Quitting an app doesn't immediately cause the memory, both active and inactive, to be dereferenced from the app so a latency exists before the inactive memory associated with the app can be freed.
This explains why using purge is the only solution to free that inactive memory associated with those apps that have memory leaks given that you allow apps to idle and only quit apps just prior to wanting the memory allocated to a new process.
This also explains why not leaving apps idle when not in use mitigates memory leakage via preventing a growth in inactive memory linked to memory leakage and providing a longer duration for both active and inactive memory to be dereferenced prior to being reallocated.
I had the same sort of thing with WoW when I upgraded my MBP to Lion. There seems to be an issue with GPU throttling - to save battery (even if you're connected to the mains).
Try this. It worked for me...
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13202033&#post13202033
The simplest fix is to restart or shut down the Mac at the end of the day.
I notice things slowing down if my Macs run for two or more days without shutting down. Since there is no really good reason for running a Mac 24/7 for days, shutting down at the end of the day does the trick.
We can debate forever why this happens; just restart and move on...
I notice things slowing down if my Macs run for two or more days without shutting down. Since there is no really good reason for running a Mac 24/7 for days, shutting down at the end of the day does the trick.
We can debate forever why this happens; just restart and move on...
There is no debate here. The OP is right. Inactive memory is freed at wrong moments or just not freed at all. I too have this problem. If you start a few virtual machines and suspend / shut them down, you will encounter this issue.
I had like 4 GB (8 GB RAM in total) inactive memory, and the OS was using the swap instead of clearing the inactive memory. Everybody has this "issue", since that's the way the OS is programmed. Maybe you've never noticed if you aren't constantly opening and closing memory intensive apps.
Unfortunatily, this is up to Apple to "fix". Since it is apperantly the way it's meant to be managed, it will probably never will be. Until then, the purge command is the only workaround.
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I have 8gb in my iMac (1333mhz early 09 3.06) and it's kernel is using around 410-440, even playing Team Fortress 2 with all my other apps open, which had Snow Leopard installed prior. My Mac Pro (2.66ghz) with 18gb 800mhz FB uses no more than 430 with about 20 apps open on idle, had Lion installed freshly. My new Macbook pro i7 2.3 with 8gb of 1866mhz hyperx uses around 450 and goes up to 475, which this one had Lion was installed as a fresh copy as well.
I am wondering if it has anything to do with the amount of MB your kernel is using. Although it probably isn't, I'm concerned if a fresh copy of Lion would have any affect, if you haven't done so already.
I don't think we're encountering quite the same issue (though they are very similar, and possibly related). I think the issue you're probably encountering is due to the OS throttling the clock speed of your video RAM. Throttling the vram will have much the same effect as running low on regular RAM, the main difference being that the issue you're attempting to solve will likely happen regardless of how much physical RAM the system sees as "free." Other than that, the problem is similar. The GPU isn't able to access data stored (in this case in vram, but due to reduced clock speed) quickly enough, so you see pauses in your otherwise smooth feed of frames while the rest of your system waits for this data to be accessed.
Nevertheless, I'll try this fix when I get home. But I have a feeling this might disable throttling caused by excess heat as well. Meaning rather than throttling back when your chip gets too hot, your system will keep going full tilt, eventually frying your card (and possibly other system components). I guess as long as this happens while the computer is still under applecare it isn't really an issue. But if your card fries 3 years down the road, you'll be out of luck (especially consider the fact that the only way to replace the GPU on these laptops is to replace the entire mobo). I'll still test this out to see if the issue is related to vram.
Though I disagree with the conclusions you're drawing from this statement, I believe what you've said is in the most basic sense, true. Inactive memory may be "free" in the sense that it's values are null (aka don't exist), but the OS doesn't categorize these two types of memory at all similarly. The OS is still holding that memory for the application that first activated it, in case the application has need for it soon.
In every other OS, when you quit the application that was using the memory, the OS actually sets that memory back to it's "free" state. Mac OS X is different for some reason. If Lion was working as intended, this memory would be released to any application when the system ran out of free RAM, and inactive would function exactly the same as free RAM (hence why people say "free RAM is wasted RAM"). But for some reason unbknownst to anybody that isn't "apple", that memory isn't being released when it is needed. This isn't isolated to memory queries by WoW. It is system wide, hence the slowdown seen after a few day's uptime.
And these memory leaks should be taken care of by the forced garbage collection when you quit the application that leaked the memory. Quitting the application should work exactly the same as the purge command in this way. The fact that the memory isn't released upon quitting tells me that not all of this inactive memory is leaked. Some of it is just "inactive", ie not being used, but still held for whatever application was using it for whatever reason.
The latency you're speaking of is in the order of milliseconds and only has to happen once for each memory address. As it is, the issues being experienced don't happen once. They continue to happen indefinitely. That is, if this concept even applies to memory held as inactive while the application is still running (which I believe it does.. or should).
I'm rightly confused at this point. You started out by saying inactive RAM was identical to free RAM, the only difference being when it was last accessed. Now you're implying that all inactive memory (or at least the inactive RAM that isn't freed when needed, which in my case is all of it) is synonymous with leaked RAM. I'm all over the place with my replies too though at this point.. This is what happens after 3 huge cups of black coffee..
What I'm trying to say is that the system does not actually view free and inactive RAM as the same thing. If it did, why would there be a separate category for it? Well the answer is that "leaked" memory is counted towards that inactive number (proving that free and inactive aren't the same thing). But this leaked memory should just be un-leaked when you quit the application as it is when you purge. For some reason it isn't.
Not leaving my applications open would solve the issue in the same way that not using them in the first place would. I don't really view either of these as solutions though.
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Well, searching google for answers turned up this massive thread of lion memory issues:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15746708#15746708
That guy is obviously having more serious issues than me (or anybody I've spoken to), but his kernel is using basically the same amount of memory as mine.
I do find such a huge discrepancy in kernel memory usage strange, but it's more likely a symptom than a cause.
This occurs because of a memory leak in an app. This can be mitigated by not idling apps that are known to have memory leaks.
http://developer.apple.com/library/...onceptual/MemoryMgmt/Articles/MemoryMgmt.html
Memory leaks cause inactive memory still associated with a running apps to not be able to be freed. This is the explicit definition of a memory leak.
When apps are quit, the memory leak impacts the inactive memory just like the app is still running until the active memory associated with the app is dereferenced. The latency until that inactive memory is dereferenced is determined by the apps reference count.
This is not necessarily true. The latency is based on the reference count of the app. If an app with a memory leak is idled for a long period, then it has a higher reference count. This indicates to the system how long memory associated with an app should persist in inactive memory before being dereferenced. It also determines the order in which inactive memory associated with apps will be freed for other processes with apps with a higher reference count being prioritized to remain as inactive memory. This behaviour preserves the temporal locality related to inactive memory.
Leave activity monitor open and visible while using your computer, you will see this occur.
Also, both the active and inactive memory that is released will be allocated to higher priority tasks if the memory leak from the idling app interfered with other functions of the OS (cron scripts, maintenance activities, indexing, & etc). This is because inactive memory associated with apps that have memory leaks isn't being released for those activities while the app is idling and saturating memory via its memory leak. This makes sense given that the inherent nature of a memory leak is to prevent unused memory (inactive memory) associated with a running app from being freed.
I believe this is what is happening in your system. This is most likely why your kernel task is using so much more memory than usual and your amount of wired memory (memory allocated to system tasks) being higher that typical as well. When you try to free up memory, all of that memory is given to the higher priority tasks before being allocated to the processes that you want to receive that memory.
I bet most users that experience the same issue that you're having also leave apps that are known for memory leaks idling for long periods.
You may not agree with my assessment of your issue. But, my machine only has 2 GB of memory while running Lion and I don't seem to get the symptoms that you have unless I let apps that are known for memory leaks idle for a fair duration while not in use.
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That seems like a fair enough conclusion. A combination of the way objective C handles memory (or rather how apple handles memory management in objective C), massive memory leaks in common applications, and the way games utilize memory causes problems. The recent update to firefox has drastically reduced memory leakage and has more or less resolved much of my problems. 2 days uptime since that update and without any significant changes to my usage habits (aside from sleeping the computer at night for ~6 hours) I still have 4.27GB free RAM. I'd say I've actually been using my computer more heavily than before, and if I hadn't been sleeping the computer I imagine I'd still have at least 3 GB free. I can probably go a week+ now before my computer becomes unusable, which is definitely an acceptable amount of uptime IMO compared to the 2 days I was getting before. Still not perfect, but I don't feel the need to take a bat to my computer anymore.
But I still don't understand why the OS has such trouble releasing this inactive memory for new programs. Yes it might take time for inactive memory to be dereferenced if I quit the program and my computer was just sitting idle. But when a game is querying the system for more RAM over and over, it seems like it would be a good idea to release some to it. And my computer usually isn't RAM starved till I start WoW. I usually sat on about 700-1GB free RAM before launching the game. So it's not like my kernel task was RAM starved. And even now with 4GB+ free, my kernel task is still using close to a gig.
But I still don't understand why the OS has such trouble releasing this inactive memory for new programs. Yes it might take time for inactive memory to be dereferenced if I quit the program and my computer was just sitting idle. But when a game is querying the system for more RAM over and over, it seems like it would be a good idea to release some to it. And my computer usually isn't RAM starved till I start WoW. I usually sat on about 700-1GB free RAM before launching the game. So it's not like my kernel task was RAM starved. And even now with 4GB+ free, my kernel task is still using close to a gig.
The OS is not the primary software responsible for releasing the memory. The app that is associated with the memory is responsible for allowing memory to be reallocated as well. This is why apps can cause memory leaks.
I think the confusion comes thinking about inactive memory as existing in a different state as active memory when it is just active memory that the system as flagged as not in use so that it can be reallocated.
The only difference between active and inactive memory is how recently it has been accessed. This is managed via reference counting, such as ARC.
The system has to prioritize processes and, obviously, system tasks are prioritized.
Given how WoW uses memory and the fact that this seems to become an issue when running WoW, it is possible that WoW has a memory leak as well.
This would cause performance to decrease the longer the game is played and would exacerbate any issues that are persisting from memory leaks prior to launching WoW.
I did a quick search and found information that suggests that the memory leaks in WoW are most commonly due to add ons. Try uninstalling any add ons that you use in WoW.
Please reread my post and tell me where I said it wasn't the memory. What I said was that the issue isn't OS X's memory management, which is quite clear given the information in your screenshots. How has that not sunk in yet?
I'll say this one last time....
It could be the physical memory you installed...it could be an issue with your logicboard....it could be memory leaks...it could be any number of other things. It most certainly isn't memory management. Unless you are here to purposely rag on OS X, take it in to an Apple Store and ask them what it is. No Apple Store nearby? Call the support line. The fact that you haven't done either is glaring.
Despite all the help munkery has given, you still reject the obvious. Props to him for being so patient.
The OP stated that he took the screenshot right after starting WoW, if he had continued to run WoW and taken a screenshot later, the page-outs would be higher. How has THAT not sunk in yet? I think he said that like.. 3 times now to different people.
Props to the OP for being so patient with all the Apple-fanboys who refuses to realize that something MAY be wrong with OS X, telling him that there is absolutely NO WAY something can be wrong with it despite the fact that the OP has ruled out other possible factors. It's been amusing to read this thread and at the same time I can't understand how the OP really has the strength to continue to post. I would have given up and moved on to a more friendly community where they aren't taking sides and are more open-minded.
Granted, munkery has been patient aswell -- but this is really the foundation of a conversation, both sides needs to be able to converse. The others(and you) have just been like "No, nothing's wrong except you. You're wrong. Take it to Apple Support".
Expecting a lot of down-votes for this but ohwell. Just proves me right that you can't take any critizism against either Apple nor yourself.
My two cents:
In conclusion, no one here (myself and the op included) has anything but guesses as to what is going on. Therefore, the best advice is to take it to an Apple store and ensure that the hardware is working correctly. I'm not saying that there isn't a problem with OS X's memory management, just that there's no way it this point to decisively point the finger at it.
- Something is wrong with the ops computer, as the behavior he describes isn't normal.
- The op has attached onto memory management as being the culprit, but it could be any number of other reasons. Without further investigation, there's no reason to blame OS X's memory management over any of the other potential problems.
- As a long time developer (both Windows and OS X), it's been my experience that the memory management in OS X is "better" than most versions of Windows (though Vista and 7 have added several techniques that have closed the gap).
- Memory leaks cause an increase in active or wired memory, not inactive memory (until the offending application is shut down). If a running application has "massive memory leaks" then you will see active or wired memory increasing.
- The difference between active memory and inactive memory has nothing to do with how recently it's been accessed. Inactive memory is memory that was being used and has been released (either voluntarily by the application, or by the OS when the application has shut down). Inactive memory is also never swapped out to disk. Therefore, there's almost no delay in releasing inactive memory to be used again.
In conclusion, no one here (myself and the op included) has anything but guesses as to what is going on. Therefore, the best advice is to take it to an Apple store and ensure that the hardware is working correctly. I'm not saying that there isn't a problem with OS X's memory management, just that there's no way it this point to decisively point the finger at it.
hey guys,
new to mac since system 8 and tower computing, sorry if this is too lame...
it used to be on older macs that you needed to "zap the p-ram" or "perimeter ram". do you still need to do this on these new macs?
new to mac since system 8 and tower computing, sorry if this is too lame...
it used to be on older macs that you needed to "zap the p-ram" or "perimeter ram". do you still need to do this on these new macs?