Gary/Owen -
Thanks for the quick response from both of you.
I forgot about Purge... it seemed like such a kludge I guess I dropped
it from my memory soon after learning about it. My analytic approach
to some things has me trying to unearth root causes when a simple,
practical relief is nearby.
I think that Mountain Lion did not solve the "problem" of freeing
inactive memory, but it may have solved the problem of letting that step
slow down interactivity. I don't see it doing it, even though it must
be. Under my 4G 10.6 system, I think that is what was dogging my
system... OSX having to stop everything while it freed some inactive
memory.
Gary, are you saying that you not only get your physical memory
saturated (with a bunch of Inactive) or that you see that causing
problems at the user level (spinning wheels!).
I would guess that with an SSD, that step, while maybe handled poorly
otherwise becomes below the noticeable threshold of the user?
I'm also unclear on exactly how virtual memory is handled on these new
high-memory machines. I grew up in the era where physical memory was
tiny (by today's standards) and virtual memory management was critical
to time-sharing... as far as I can tell from my activity monitor/process
table, none of my applications are actually *using* swap space? Isn't
that the point of an indicator that you actually HAVE free memory
available? I would expect a tool that also showed how much swap space
was being used by what processes, and in fact if I dredge my own memory
might find that some of the tools from the "golden days of UNIX" are
still relevant!
- Steve
O
n my non-SSD mini, before the change to SSD, I often had the
experience you mention. Since then, no. But likely the behavior is
still the same, just that the SSD manages it better.
Before SSD, I had to run "purge" in a terminal to get the memory back.
I'll try starting lots of apps and see what happens on the new mini/SSD.
Would be nice if Apple, finally, learns to handle swap space better.
Maybe Mountain Lion did so?
-- Owen
On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Steve Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Owen ( and other OSX fanbois) -
I'm guessing that a few others here will be interested in the
technical details of this topic...
I did not become interested in OSXs memory management until about
6 months ago when my PBPro with 4G running 10.6.x started throwing
me the rainbow frisbee of death (or at least tedium) often. I
began to look at the process table (via Activity Monitor) and
noticed that **all** my applications seemed to be bloating up with
memory... as if each and every one had memory leaks.
Firefox, Thunderbird and Skype were the most notable. I kind of
assumed that the problem was a system library that they all
shared, and aggravated by the fact that they were all naturally
wanting/needing/using lots of their own internal cache (well,
maybe not Tbird so much?)... I also assumed that I had not
updated my system properly (I tend to be pretty cavalier about
keeping up with suggested updates, but trust the system (at large)
to know what needs to be updated and not leave anything in the
cracks)...
I recently finally buried that machine after stripping it down to
replace the charging port only to find afterwards that the problem
was NOT that my battery was zeroed and my charge port too fried to
take power... I finally gave up and blamed the easy/last-resort
"logic board failure". I give my machines a lot of abuse. One
of the SFX interns inherited the one my wife ran over in Iowa
(shattered screen... he used it with an external monitor).
Anyway... back on topic. The 15" 2010 MBP I bought to replace
it had 8G and Mountain Lion installed. I assumed (hoped futilely)
that my problems would evaporate with a full (up to date) fresh
system (10.8.4 install and max memory). I didn't fret about it
much but within a few days I started noticing (mostly because my
previous machine had taught me to compulsively check the Memory
Usage monitor) that I was operating on virtually 0 free memory as
before. The big difference was that I was not getting the
whirling frisbee of death very often and nearly 1/2 of the memory
is labeled "Inactive", though under the 4G 10.6 circumstance I
also had significant "Inactive" memory available at all times...
I am postulating (very tentatively) that this new
machine/configuration is more efficient at reclaiming "Inactive
Memory" just-in-time... perhaps because it has the quad-thread
version of the duo core or perhaps 10.8 fixed it up, or because my
old system was just poorly configured (memory management libraries
out of date?).
One thing I am wondering is if others have had this problem
(saturating physical memory and NOT getting efficient reclaiming
of Inactive memory)? Or if others understand whether this is a
real problem or just my lame understanding of how the memory
management is supposed to work (I would sort of expect the Apps
themselves to be managing memory more effectively than they seem
to themselves, not just trusting the VM to keep them out of
trouble?).
- Steve
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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