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Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

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Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#51

Post by carguy1983 »

I have an 8-way Xeon Mac Pro w/ 20GB of RAM, almost half of which is 'free' at any point during the day unless I'm doing something really out of the ordinary.

Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open.

I really don't give a shit how it's not "technically" broken - that's broken from an experience point of view. And I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an App Store upgrade from Snow leopard) because that's a major pain in the ass as this is an actual workstation used to do actual work.

I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. Anyway, I guess I'm just ranting. OS X is wonderful except for the fact that it sucks at managing memory to keep a system snappy.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#52

Post by mahyarm »

jsolson wrote: post #41
gurkendoktor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, Lion runs like crap without an SSD or insane amounts of RAM for many people. It doesn't help if it works for some, or even the majority. If anything, we need more people digging in OS X internals. I am sorry to use a tired analogy here, but Vista did work great for many too. I have two Macs, one brand new, one migrated from SL, and 10.7 Safari was almost unusable on both until I installed SSDs. If that…

> The thing is, Lion runs like crap without an SSD or insane amounts of RAM for many people. YES. I have a MacBook Pro Core i7 from a little while back with an old style spinning rust drive and a 11" MacBook Air Core 2 Duo. For purely CPU bound things, sure, the Core i7 kicks the pants out of the Core 2. Same for videogames. For day to day use, though, switching between Eclipse, Xcode, Chrome, etc. the Air provides a…

Why don't you spend $140 and add an SSD to the pro? You can keep the HDD for an extra $80 with a cd drive bay HDD caddy.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#53

Post by WiseWeasel »

bsimpson wrote: post #17

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.

As another Mac user since "the beginning", I could smell that rotten smell; slightly at first with SL, then thick and rancid with Lion. So my Macs are now back on 10.5 Leopard, and I'm not missing a thing, the lousy performance in particular. Unless ML turns out to be hugely superior, I might be stuck on 10.5 until I get a machine that simply can't run it anymore.

In the meantime, I'm also hedging my bets, and I've gotten very comfortable with Windows 7 for productivity (ok, it's really for gaming) and Ubuntu Linux for web/LAN serving.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#54

Post by obituary_latte »

colomon wrote: post #43
obituary_latte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't recognize any of his symptoms anyway, and my OS X computers get pretty RAM-heavy use, with almost always a linux VM open, XCode, Safari with ~10 tabs, iTunes with a few thousand songs, etc. Oh boy I wish I could say the same. Admittedly I don't shut down on a daily basis but this didn't used to be a problem in SL. FWIW I've an old tank of a tower that has a video card on its last leg.. shutting down invariab…

For what it's worth, I'm running Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and I see the same sort of terrible performance the article describes. Though I did improve matters drastically by telling mds not to index my (Linux) MP3 server and my Time Machine drive. That made it go from nearly unusable to just frequently annoying. The other crazy thing I've been seeing is it routinely takes Chrome minutes to shutdown -- in fact, pretty muc…

Ah yes. The dreaded Chrome renderer never enderer.

I too have experienced the Chrome issue enough that I don't even try to close it normally anymore. Force quit is the only way I exit Chrome. Thankfully, the restore tabs functionality works well.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#55

Post by spudlyo »

What really needs to happen is that Spotlight and Time Machine need to use direct i/o (F_NOCACHE) when they read data from the filesystem, this way they won't pollute the disk cache with their reads and OSX won't swap out a bunch of pages in response.

I think you could probably hack something together that does this with DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES (OSX's LD_PRELOAD) that would would hook the open system call and fcntl F_NOCACHE on the file descriptor before it hands it back to the application.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#56

Post by DanI-S »

I'm (fairly) uninformed on this, but from an initial read of the post it seems like memory management may have been optimized for SSD-equipped systems, at the expense of hard disk performance?

Whether this is unintentional, part of a calculated tradeoff, or a cynical business/tactical decision is another thing.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#58

Post by sliverstorm »

carguy1983 wrote: post #51

I have an 8-way Xeon Mac Pro w/ 20GB of RAM, almost half of which is 'free' at any point during the day unless I'm doing something really out of the ordinary. Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open. I really don't give a shit how it's not "technically" broken - that's broken from an experience point of view. And I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an…

I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s.

At least Windows, having gone through this particular growing pain, is nowadays fairly painless to reinstall. Did OSX ever improve that aspect of their product?

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#59

Post by thought_alarm »

carguy1983 wrote: post #51

I have an 8-way Xeon Mac Pro w/ 20GB of RAM, almost half of which is 'free' at any point during the day unless I'm doing something really out of the ordinary. Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open. I really don't give a shit how it's not "technically" broken - that's broken from an experience point of view. And I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an…

Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open.

That's not swapping. That delay is /usr/bin/login searching the system logs so that it can display the date and time of your last login.

Create a .hushlogin file in your home directory to prevent that.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#60

Post by rohansingh »

sliverstorm wrote: post #58
carguy1983 wrote: post #51

I have an 8-way Xeon Mac Pro w/ 20GB of RAM, almost half of which is 'free' at any point during the day unless I'm doing something really out of the ordinary. Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open. I really don't give a shit how it's not "technically" broken - that's broken from an experience point of view. And I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an…

I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. At least Windows, having gone through this particular growing pain, is nowadays fairly painless to reinstall. Did OSX ever improve that aspect of their product?

Yes. I reinstalled OS X on a couple machines do to various issues. I was extremely surprised at how nice the experience is. When I logged back in after the reinstall, Chrome even reopened with my old tabs in it.
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