31–40 of 269 posts
I tried turning off spotlight (which was taking a very long time to complete) but it did not help.
For me, the problem turned out to be a failing hard drive. After replacing my system hard drive, things returned to normal speed.
I'm just posting this in case it might help someone else.
No actual data, barely any technical discussion at all, mention of "the garbage collection algorithm" which most likely isn't even being used by most of the apps running, capped by a total cargo-cult solution... and this is #1 on the front page?
the OS X kernel is open source. so why aren't people reading it to figure out where this bug is?
Yeah, I'm sure if you just read the Darwin kernel there's a '#define USE_LOTS_OF_MEMORY 1' in there that you can change. The class of problems described in the original post are not the sort of thing you 'just find' by glancing at kernel source code. The problems described sound like they could be an issue of poorly tuned heuristics/thresholds, or necessitate some extra machinery inside the OS X memory manager that i…
everyone is all positive about "open source" until they have to dive into a few millions lines of complicated system-level C code and then...
Not this again, we already went through this a few weeks ago. Back then, I thought the conclusion was that there is nothing broken about OS X memory management, and that with every 'fix' you come up with, you will just introduce another degenerate corner case. The same holds for any OS, trade-offs are made that may have some negative effect in some cases, to the benefit of the general cases. I don't recognize any of…
I see the same issues the guy in the article has seen. Basically, I have a total of 8GB of ram in this here mac mini, and when my desktop session gets heavy things start going south. For example: Let's take a large Chrome session (~150 tabs spread over several windows), an IDE open somewhere, Spotify, Steam and some background apps, and a small Windows VM. Generally, Activity Monitor would show that Chrome in this in…
You don't have to fill up every last bit of RAM before the OS starts swapping, as there could be pinned memory pages or processes that want to do larger allocations that are only held for a short time. If you have less than a few hundred MB of unused RAM with all the stuff you mentioned going on, it only takes some kind of scheduled OS background job to push the OS over the line where it decides it needs to swap in/out.
That said, from the comments some people posted here, it does appear that at least in some situations there seems to be something going on in some versions of OS X Lion. If Snow Leopard and the Mountain Lion preview are unaffected with the exact same usage pattern, maybe there actually is some kind of bug in the OS X memory management. But I'd still like to see some kind of evidence, facts or statistics, as I have never experienced anything like it myself, not even on my MacBook when it still had only 2 GB of RAM.
the OS X kernel is open source. so why aren't people reading it to figure out where this bug is?
Yeah, I'm sure if you just read the Darwin kernel there's a '#define USE_LOTS_OF_MEMORY 1' in there that you can change. The class of problems described in the original post are not the sort of thing you 'just find' by glancing at kernel source code. The problems described sound like they could be an issue of poorly tuned heuristics/thresholds, or necessitate some extra machinery inside the OS X memory manager that i…
I've been a Mac user since the beginning, and by far my biggest frustration is the perpetual running-out-of-RAM, even when I close basically everything. I have 4GB of RAM, and frequently catch kernel_task using at least half of it.
I've been a Mac user since the beginning, and by far my biggest frustration is the perpetual running-out-of-RAM, even when I close basically everything. I have 4GB of RAM, and frequently catch kernel_task using at least half of it.
Why shouldn't the kernel be using as much memory as possible? It's not like big disk caches or what have you cause your memory to go bad? As long as you get it back when you need it, who cares ?
No actual data, barely any technical discussion at all, mention of "the garbage collection algorithm" which most likely isn't even being used by most of the apps running, capped by a total cargo-cult solution... and this is #1 on the front page?
Probably a lot of people hitting the up arrow to save the link to try out this evening. I plead guilty to doing that. I wish I'd read the comments first.