MacOS X a dog or just in need of a good bitch slap?
Dr Phred
(Moderator)
– December 10, 2007 10:05AM
Can't keep a good topic down....
-Swine Flu free since...cough, cough...
tliet
– April 04, 2012 03:29AM
Daniel,
How much RAM does your Mac have? My gf wife is complaining that her MacBook Pro with 4 Gb gets awfully slow and I also had problems, until I swapped the HD for an SSD. My MacBook Pro has 6 Gb RAM and since the SSD I've had no problems with slow downs.
Also, did you upgrade, or do a clean install of Lion?
ddt
– April 04, 2012 06:27AM
Thanks, Ton. I have 4GB, which used to be fine... and it was an upgrade (I know, a clean install is the way to go, but that task seemed way too daunting).
ddt
tliet
– April 04, 2012 07:16AM
There's definitely something up with Lion's memory usage, I think it's becoming more like iOS.
http://tidbits.com/article/12398
Also, there's no 'free memory' under OS X (or UNIX for that matter). I believe the OS takes every bit of RAM to optimise for speed. As for the upgrade, I would actually do a fresh install. It worked absolute wonders for me.
Last question; did you do an in-place upgrade of Snow Leopard too (from Leopard)? If so, then we're talking some major cruft that may be clogging up the tubes.
John Willoughby
– April 04, 2012 07:22AM
Homo Sapiens Sedentarius
The big deal with Lion was that it was supposed to silently close apps in the background (and allow them to restart with all of their info intact) as it needed memory. Perhaps that is why it doesn't care how much active apps use. Of course, if you are getting excessive page swaps and memory-related errors, this is bogus. I've not had any trouble with memory and Lion, but I tend to run one or two apps at a time on my laptops. If I was still doing professional work on a desktop, I'd be stressing it more.
Tony Leggett
(Moderator)
– April 04, 2012 03:25PM
It's kinda depressing that you need 6GB of RAM and a SSD to make Lion feel "snappy".
I think all of Apple's software development should be done on their most bare bones hardware offering and if it can't run smoothly on that - there's bloat that needs trimmed.
Snow Leopard forever!
TL
Cloudscout
– April 04, 2012 03:29PM
˙pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ʎɯ ɥʇıʍ ƃuoɹʍ ƃuıɥʇǝɯos sı ǝɹǝɥʇ ʞuıɥʇ ı ?ɹǝʇndɯoɔ ʎɯ ɥʇıʍ ǝɯ dlǝɥ ǝuoǝɯos uɐɔ
SNOW LEOPARD 4 LYFE!
tliet
– April 04, 2012 11:09PM
I do like Lion, even though it has some issues. The regular updates seemend to have slowed down, haven't they?
Tony, remember the time when Mac OS 9.2.2 was king? 128 Mb RAM was plenty. Then came Mac OS X along.
Have you looked back?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/04/2012 11:10PM by tliet.
Tony Leggett
(Moderator)
– April 04, 2012 11:27PM
tliet
– April 05, 2012 12:34AM
Gmail can be configured as a Microsoft Exchange (ActiveSync) service on the iPhone and in my experience it works absolutely brilliant.
Tony Leggett
(Moderator)
– April 05, 2012 02:55PM
Quote
Tony, remember the time when Mac OS 9.2.2 was king? 128 Mb RAM was plenty. Then came Mac OS X along.
tliet,
That's my point. OS X does a couple of extra tricks than OS9 and has a prettier interface - but does that really justify needing 20 or 40 times the RAM to run smoothly?
At the end of the day, it's an operating system.
johnny k
– April 05, 2012 04:33PM
Oh, you're trolling, Tony!
ddt
– April 05, 2012 07:38PM
How do people work around Lion's autosave function when working on, say, a design, or writing something? Do you Duplicate when you open the file and start from there? I hate having experimenting and noodling overwrite a save and no way to revert.
ddt
tliet
– April 05, 2012 07:42PM
Indeed, I'm quite baffled by this. Sure the initial versions of Mac OS X were slow and used (compared to Mac OS 9) 'too much' RAM. But can you imagine Mac OS 9 doing the things that you're regularly doing now on the Mac?
This 4 y/o MacBook Pro that I'm typing this on screams with Lion. It's zippier than zippy and runs Windows XP with Parallels faster than on my subnotebook that I've been using in the past few years. Sure, Lion loves RAM, it uses every last byte it can lay its claws on. But to compare it with an operating system that was hacked together in 1983 on a 64 kbyte Mac is a bit... silly.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/05/2012 07:45PM by tliet.
tliet
– April 05, 2012 07:44PM
dpbd; Daniel. TimeMachine is for versioning...
ddt
– April 05, 2012 07:54PM
Time Machine? Nooooooo!
And: Really?
ddt
dharlow
– April 05, 2012 08:03PM
Show all process? Also maybe you should consider switching to Chrome it does not hog as much memory.
johnny k
– April 05, 2012 08:04PM
Whether you have free RAM is not relevant; whether your computer is slow is.
Versions for versioning, not the full-blown Time Machine. Pretty convenient to do it right in the app. But now I'm just used to doing my thing and where I would do a Save As... I now do Duplicate, and choose to Duplicate and Revert, which opens a new window with my latest state, and reverts my existing file back to the last "hard" saved version (Command-S now marks a reversion point).
johnny k
– April 05, 2012 08:05PM
Also, Daniel (Harlow), Chrome takes up a couple of GB in memory for me, though I have several dozen tabs open.
ddt
– April 05, 2012 08:17PM
Johnny, whenever I get to that point on the pie graph, I start getting beachballs and apps stop responding for up to a minute. If VLC is playing something, playback stutters or stops.
So, that sure does affect how slow my computer "is"!
ddt
tliet
– April 06, 2012 03:57AM
Hm, how can I use versioning without TimeMachine? Serious question, as I don't see versions in the file system?
And I dunno about Camino and its memory usage, but it seems a bit rich.
This is my Mac with
all processes.
And this is just
my own processes.
I tried FreeMemory once, but it ended only in minutes of beachballing with OS X taking up most of the 'freed' RAM within minutes again.
