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| 'Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management' |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-04-23 16:29:22 |
| Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else. |
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| I experienced this |
| By yoursecretninja on 2012-04-23 17:19:35 |
| I experienced all of the symptoms listed on my Mac Mini. I thought it was a problem with my hardware, which is aging, but should still be usable. It's a late 2009 model (core duo; 4GB ram). This weekend, I setup dual-boot on it. I did a fresh install of Lion on one partition and a fresh install of Ubuntu on the other. Lion still works terrible. Ubuntu works awesome. This article further confirms for me what my experiment did; that Lion is the problem and not my computer. Snow Leopard worked great by the way. I guess I'll put that back on. |
 - Score: 4 |
| Nothing that can't be fixed |
| By Sodki on 2012-04-23 17:19:55 |
| Nothing that can't be fixed, like the Windows case you presented. I wouldn't say the problem lies with Apple's priorities, just that the current system is "good enough". |
| - Score: 1 |
| I've experienced exactly this |
| By theosib on 2012-04-23 17:46:13 |
| Ever since I upgraded to Lion, I've been experiencing this. I've been filing tons of bug reports with Apple, but they haven't fixed it. I've sent lots of debug info they requested, however, so maybe they're working on it. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Doesn't jive with my experence. |
| By Bill Shooter of Bul on 2012-04-23 17:48:46 |
|
OS X has always seemed to be better than just about anything at handling memory, in my non scientific experience. Safari does seem to be terrible and using and freeing memory, which is why I don't use safari on macs. But that's about all I've noticed. I only play with a friends Windows 7 laptop from time to time, which is only rebooted when necessary for installs/updates. It seems just as good as the mac, which is a huge improvement over how bad XP was. I might have a different opinion if I abused it as much as I do my other operating systems,but it seems to be good. Edit: after reading the article, it seems like its tied in to the disk thrashing that Time Machine does. I don't use time machine, preferring to just rsync my backups to a spare server. Edited 2012-04-23 17:52 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Nothing that can't be fixed |
| By _xmv on 2012-04-23 17:49:14 |
|
Yeah like by running Windows, which doesn't have such issues. Seriously so, most people pay extra for the Apple stuff in order to avoid exactly that kind of issues, which is no small bug. Windows has no such issue. Linux has no such issue. They'd notice in a heartbeat. Likewise, wifi+bt is broken on MBA's (use both at the same time = wifi disconnects every 10-100s). No big class action, no fix, just "use a wired keyboard, not a bluetooth one". Personally, I think that's terribly wrong. |
| - Score: 7 |
| RE: Doesn't jive with my experence. |
| By No it isnt on 2012-04-23 17:56:44 |
| "Always seemed better"? It needs more memory than pretty much any other OS just to boot from disk, and takes more time to chew swap as well. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: Nothing that can't be fixed |
| By BluenoseJake on 2012-04-23 18:00:52 |
| But it isn't good enough, that's the point. |
| - Score: 8 |
| RE: Doesn't jive with my experence. |
| By BlackV on 2012-04-23 18:06:02 |
|
> Edit: after reading the article, it seems like its tied in to the disk thrashing that Time Machine does. I don't use time machine, preferring to just rsync my backups to a spare server. It is not, I'm not using Time Machine, yet I'm hit by that issue and I'm not alone here: https://discussions.apple.com/thr... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: I experienced this |
| By backdoc on 2012-04-23 18:11:25 |
|
And a resounding, "Me Too!" I have a late 2008 mbp. It has never been a speed demon. But, it's been good enough. I noticed major slow downs after Lion. My assumption was that Apple had ladened it with iCloud stuff. I have been planning to replace my mbp because of this issue. I would just go straight Linux. But, I have gotten kinda used to Adobe Lightroom. So, I might just get a Windows laptop, yuck! |
| - Score: 2 |
| Editorial? |
| By BeOSJim on 2012-04-23 18:18:12 |
|
I like the way the story end with "This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else." Is this like saying that since General Electric makes everything from jet engines to healthcare to appliances to televisions that the lightbulbs they make aren't very good? Since Microsoft makes money elsewhere and loses it with Bing, that must not be any good either? Since Coca-cola owns Minute Maid and less than 2/3 of its revenue comes from that, then it must not be very good either... I know my examples are ridiculous, but I wanted to make a point about that line. I do I agree with the story, the memory management needs a lot of work. |
| - Score: 5 |
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