15 ms·

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.

by carguy1983 14y ago

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 App Store upgrade from Snow leopard) because that's a major pain in the ass as this is an actual workstation used to do actual work. I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. Anyway, I guess I'm just ranting. OS X is wonderful except for the fact that it sucks at managing memory to keep a system snappy.

sliverstorm 14y ago
I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. At least Windows, having gone through this particular growing pain, is nowadays fairly painless to reinstall. Did OSX ever improve that aspect of their product?
- rohansingh 14y ago
  Yes. I reinstalled OS X on a couple machines do to various issues. I was extremely surprised at how nice the experience is. When I logged back in after the reinstall, Chrome even reopened with my old tabs in it.
  - replax 14y ago
    Not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. Would really really annoy me, tough. If I reinstall an OS, I do it because I want a clean plate, everything back to "standard". Opening my old tabs in my browser tells me, that it kept various config/temp files, which is probably what I wanted to get rid of.
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      If you want to lose all of your user settings, create a new user account and nuke the old one. If you want to replace various bits of the system, reinstall the OS. These are different scenarios with different use-cases, and I'd argue it's a much worse idea to conflate the behaviours, as in certain other OSes, than OS X's fault for properly treating them as separate operations.
    - fredsted 14y ago
      User and System files are separate in Unix. It's a good thing.
- ryannielsen 14y ago
  1) It's never been "hard" to reinstall OS X. What was difficult last time you tried? 2) The OS reinstall path is identical to the OS upgrade path, making it very well tested. This has been the case since (IIRC) Snow Leopard. 3) The latest few generations of hardware can even (re)install the OS over the internet, meaning you don't even need to carry around media to reinstall. (Assuming you're on a fast connection or are willing to wait.) It's entirely painless to reinstall OS X.
thought_alarm 14y ago
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.
- carguy1983 14y ago
  HALLELUJAH. Thanks.
- mistercow 14y ago
  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.
  - dustingetz 14y ago
    It's worth it when you realize someone else has been logging on as you over the weekend.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      Well, I suppose it seems sillier on a laptop than on a desktop.
      - mlreed328 14y ago
        or a server...
        mistercow 14y ago
        Well sure, but I wasn't saying that it should be default behavior for Mac OS X server or server-aimed n*x distros. I don't think that most people are using non-server Mac OS X as a remote server, and those who are could override the default.
speleding 14y ago
Putting an SSD in for me solved all the problems you mentioned. Haven't seen a beach ball since. Lion has probably been optimized for SSD since Apple is quickly getting rid of spinning disks in their entire line up.
acdha 14y ago
> I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an App Store upgrade from Snow leopard) because that's a major pain in the ass as this is an actual workstation used to do actual work. This has never been hard to do on OS X since 10.0 because they followed the Unix convention of separating user data from system files. It is, of course, rarely necessary unless you've used superuser access to seriously muck with things under /System. I've done this repeatedly over the years when dealing with beta releases & system migrations and it's never taken much longer than the time needed to copy the files.
mixmastamyk 14y ago
I disable swap on all my machines over 4gb... Windows, Linux, or OSX. There are people who will advise against this, but in 5 years I've not had any problems. I think once or twice firefox leaked uncontrollably and therefore killed.
- dkersten 14y ago
  Not sure what my settings are now, but I used to keep swap off on my Windows machine (especially while playing games, since swapping kills gaming performance).
st3fan 14y ago
"Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME " You should run some dtrace magic to find out what 'it' is. MIght be the OS, might be a badly behaving application. Who knows. I find it too easy to blame the OS for all of this. One poorly written app can cause a lot of performance damage.
dspillett 14y ago
> Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME Is it actively paging to disk at times when there is plenty of free RAM? A common complaint on Linux is "I've closed a lot of stuff but it is still using swap" because even if the pages are read back into RAM when next used they are kept in the swap area in case they need to go out again (that way they don't need to be written unless changed, saving some I/O). Under Linux you can see how much is found in both RAM and on disk with the "SwapCached" entry in /proc/meminfo - it won't stop counting those pages as present in the swap areas until either it runs out of never used swap space so needs to overwrite then to page out other pages or the page is changes in memory (at which point the copy on disk is stale so can not be reused without being updated anyway). > and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open. Have you monitored system activity at such times to see where the delay is? While it could be due to unnecessary disk I/O it could also be elsewhere such as delayed DNS lookups if anything in your profile scripts does such a thing and there is an issue with your connectivity or DNS configuration. (I'm not an OS X user and never have been so sorry if these thoughts are irrelevant - but I'm guessing memory management in OS X is similar enough for knowledge of how Linux plays the game not to be completely useless)

sliverstorm 14y ago

I can't believe this is actually advice, either - that's what Windows users used to say in the 90s. At least Windows, having gone through this particular growing pain, is nowadays fairly painless to reinstall. Did OSX ever improve that aspect of their product?

rohansingh 14y ago
Yes. I reinstalled OS X on a couple machines do to various issues. I was extremely surprised at how nice the experience is. When I logged back in after the reinstall, Chrome even reopened with my old tabs in it.
- replax 14y ago
  Not sure if that is a good or a bad thing. Would really really annoy me, tough. If I reinstall an OS, I do it because I want a clean plate, everything back to "standard". Opening my old tabs in my browser tells me, that it kept various config/temp files, which is probably what I wanted to get rid of.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    If you want to lose all of your user settings, create a new user account and nuke the old one. If you want to replace various bits of the system, reinstall the OS. These are different scenarios with different use-cases, and I'd argue it's a much worse idea to conflate the behaviours, as in certain other OSes, than OS X's fault for properly treating them as separate operations.
  - fredsted 14y ago
    User and System files are separate in Unix. It's a good thing.
ryannielsen 14y ago
1) It's never been "hard" to reinstall OS X. What was difficult last time you tried? 2) The OS reinstall path is identical to the OS upgrade path, making it very well tested. This has been the case since (IIRC) Snow Leopard. 3) The latest few generations of hardware can even (re)install the OS over the internet, meaning you don't even need to carry around media to reinstall. (Assuming you're on a fast connection or are willing to wait.) It's entirely painless to reinstall OS X.

thought_alarm 14y ago

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.

carguy1983 14y ago
HALLELUJAH. Thanks.
mistercow 14y ago
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.
- dustingetz 14y ago
  It's worth it when you realize someone else has been logging on as you over the weekend.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    Well, I suppose it seems sillier on a laptop than on a desktop.
    - mlreed328 14y ago
      or a server...
      - mistercow 14y ago
        Well sure, but I wasn't saying that it should be default behavior for Mac OS X server or server-aimed n*x distros. I don't think that most people are using non-server Mac OS X as a remote server, and those who are could override the default.

speleding 14y ago

Putting an SSD in for me solved all the problems you mentioned. Haven't seen a beach ball since. Lion has probably been optimized for SSD since Apple is quickly getting rid of spinning disks in their entire line up.

acdha 14y ago

> I haven't re-installed the OS (this was an App Store upgrade from Snow leopard) because that's a major pain in the ass as this is an actual workstation used to do actual work. This has never been hard to do on OS X since 10.0 because they followed the Unix convention of separating user data from system files. It is, of course, rarely necessary unless you've used superuser access to seriously muck with things under /System. I've done this repeatedly over the years when dealing with beta releases & system migrations and it's never taken much longer than the time needed to copy the files.

mixmastamyk 14y ago

I disable swap on all my machines over 4gb... Windows, Linux, or OSX. There are people who will advise against this, but in 5 years I've not had any problems. I think once or twice firefox leaked uncontrollably and therefore killed.

dkersten 14y ago
Not sure what my settings are now, but I used to keep swap off on my Windows machine (especially while playing games, since swapping kills gaming performance).

st3fan 14y ago

"Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME " You should run some dtrace magic to find out what 'it' is. MIght be the OS, might be a badly behaving application. Who knows. I find it too easy to blame the OS for all of this. One poorly written app can cause a lot of performance damage.

dspillett 14y ago

> Yet it still swaps to disk ALL THE TIME Is it actively paging to disk at times when there is plenty of free RAM? A common complaint on Linux is "I've closed a lot of stuff but it is still using swap" because even if the pages are read back into RAM when next used they are kept in the swap area in case they need to go out again (that way they don't need to be written unless changed, saving some I/O). Under Linux you can see how much is found in both RAM and on disk with the "SwapCached" entry in /proc/meminfo - it won't stop counting those pages as present in the swap areas until either it runs out of never used swap space so needs to overwrite then to page out other pages or the page is changes in memory (at which point the copy on disk is stale so can not be reused without being updated anyway). > and a new Terminal.app window can take up to 5 seconds to open. Have you monitored system activity at such times to see where the delay is? While it could be due to unnecessary disk I/O it could also be elsewhere such as delayed DNS lookups if anything in your profile scripts does such a thing and there is an issue with your connectivity or DNS configuration. (I'm not an OS X user and never have been so sorry if these thoughts are irrelevant - but I'm guessing memory management in OS X is similar enough for knowledge of how Linux plays the game not to be completely useless)