The only winners are those "Mac cleaner, keeper" apps whose Google Ads know we are all watching beach balls.
Apple should really sell ad space on those beach balls.
Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
91–100 of 269 posts
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#92You can run `purge` in a terminal to free your 'inactive' ram. I've set up a cron job to purge frequently, keeps thing humming.
That's a terrible idea. `purge` is not a tool for freeing inactive ram. It's a tool for deleting the filesystem cache in order to simulate cold boot conditions for performance analysis. Yes, it has the side effect of reducing memory usage, inasmuch as it's throwing away stuff that was kept in memory. But that doesn't make it an appropriate tool to use.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's worth it when you realize someone else has been logging on as you over the weekend.
Well, I suppose it seems sillier on a laptop than on a desktop.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#94When time machine starts on my MBA ( to an external hd ) it almost freezes the Mac. Is this related?
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Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#95Does anyone else notice extreme time-based slowdowns using multiple monitors? I've looked through forums and system logs and I can't find an immediate explanation for it. The system tends to hang when using multiple monitors for any extended period of time.
Yes, ever since Lion I need to use the 9600m in my MBP instead of relying on the cooler running and less power hungry 9400m.
Never noticed the ram problem, but there are other issues with Lion that I never encountered with Snow Leopard.
For instance, sleep seems to take forever now and I can't use my external monitor without the fridge magnet hack.
I might get downvoted for this, but my MBP seems faster and runs better on Windows 7 than on Lion at the moment.
I hope ML improves the experience.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#96I 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.
I want to reach across the internet and hug you right now.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't the latter void warranty?
It doesn't appear to, however if you ever have to get your machine serviced you have to painstakingly undo and redo the installation, as Apple doesn't guarantee the machine that comes back from the factory will have your extra drive in it.
If I were to do it over again I'd just get a larger SSD and leave the optical drive alone.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The notion that disk cache is so ungodly important that the OS will SWAP MY APPLICATIONS OUT TO DISK PRESERVE IT boggles my mind a bit. Users of desktop systems clearly don't like this behavior, in fact they'll do crazy things like purging disk cache via cron every minute to try to stop this from happening.
Ok, consider the following scenario:
Process A (let's call it Safari) allocated 600MB of memory. Out of this 600MB, it hasn't used 400MB for quite a while (because, for example, it contains data for tabs you haven't looked at for hours). Now I'm not sure how Darwin does this but I know for a fact that Windows NT kernels will try to write the contents of in-memory pages to the disk at the first good opportunity; this way they save time when the pages in question will really get paged out to the disk. I assume that there's a similar mechanism in Darwin. So it's very likely that the 400MB in question is already on the disk. Now the user starts process B (let's call it Final Cut Pro) that reads ands writes to the disk very heavily, and typically the same things. It's not an unreasonable thing to do on the kernel's part to just drop Safari's 400MB from the physical memory and use it for disk caching Final Cut Pro. Throw in a few mmaps to the picture and suddenly it's not obvious at all which pages should be in the memory and which pages should be on the disk for the best user experience.
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#99I 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 - that does make a difference in launching a terminal!
Re: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management
#100No 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?
Garbage collection does not have to mean GC as we know it from Java. It's not that the objects created by the app are garbage collected. The whole memory management in modern systems resembles a GC (it pretty much is a GC). Just instead of managing liveness of the objects, you manage the block mapping. Sometimes you have to write them back to the disk, sometimes you have no memory left and you have to swap them out...
That's pretty much the GC algorithm. There's nothing wrong with that mention.