Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management

Post by hmart » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 5:27 PM UTC

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…

Post by js2 » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 5:28 PM UTC

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.

  kore:~$ ls -l .hushlogin
  -rw-r--r--  1 jay  staff  0 Aug 15  2002 .hushlogin

Post by Shivetya » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

Post by spudlyo » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

DrJokepu wrote: post #47

krakensden wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he's not getting it back when he needs it?

Recent Windows NT kernels, recent Linux kernels and recent Darwin kernels will drop disk cache pages the moment something more important needs them. Memory management in modern kernels can be very complicated and just because it appears that a process does a lot of paging it doesn't necessarily mean that it needs more physical memory.

Post by bo1024 » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

jfb wrote: post #37

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.

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 ?