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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

#61

Post by carguy1983 »

thought_alarm wrote: post #59
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.

HALLELUJAH. Thanks.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#62

Post by k-mcgrady »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #8
w0utert wrote: post #4

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…

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…

I'm running on a 160GB HDD (nearly full), 2GB ram, on a 4 year old MacBook. I always have iTunes, Xcode, Safari/Chrome running with multiple tabs, and a mail client (Sparrow). The system originally ran Leopard and I upgraded to SL and then Lion. I wouldn't say it's slow. It's definitely getting slower but that's expected since it's such an old system. Could it be that you're just expecting too much from your computer?

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#64

Post by dserodio »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #40
dreish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do that too sometimes. Wtb separate save button.

http://getpocket.com/

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#65

Post by mistercow »

thought_alarm wrote: post #59
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.

Wow, I'm really surprised this isn't default behavior. Knowing when you last logged in isn't nearly useful enough to justify the delay it so routinely causes.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#66

Post by kirbysayshi »

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…

Firefox 12 does this too, on both my MB Pro and iMac. I think it has to flush so many caches that disk I/O just takes forever. This is purely conjecture, though.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#68

Post by newobj »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #8
w0utert wrote: post #4

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…

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…

Insane amounts? Like 16G? That I can buy for like $80?

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#69

Post by wickedchicken »

munin wrote: post #34
kevingadd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yes I know, that's the point of my question ;) 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...

> and then...

become immensely employable.

Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

#70

Post by jmcnevin »

thought_alarm wrote: post #59
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.

Wow, thank you for this. The delay caused by this behavior has been driving me crazy for a really long time.
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