[CheesePuff]

OK, so like the topic says, I was running OS X 10.2 on my G4 800 for about 2 days straight with all the same apps running and nothing else.

When I checked at the beginning it had 300 MB RAM free (physical), and when I came back 2 days later it had 10 MB free. This also made a lot of tasks slow.

I only had 2 basic Cococa (well-written, popular) apps running.

This never happened in OS X 10.1.5, anyone know whats up?

Thanks...

[mattyd]

how can i tell how much ram is being used and how much is left?

Originally posted by CheesePuff:
OK, so like the topic says, I was running OS X 10.2 on my G4 800 for about 2 days straight with all the same apps running and nothing else.

When I checked at the beginning it had 300 MB RAM free (physical), and when I came back 2 days later it had 10 MB free. This also made a lot of tasks slow.

I only had 2 basic Cococa (well-written, popular) apps running.

This never happened in OS X 10.1.5, anyone know whats up?

Thanks...

[CheesePuff]

Originally posted by mattyd:
how can i tell how much ram is being used and how much is left?

Ugh, not the response I was hoping for.



Just kidding... open Terminal and type "top", but I always do "top -u" so it sorts the most CPU using apps first.

[wingdo]

Originally posted by mattyd:
how can i tell how much ram is being used and how much is left?

From a terminal window type "top" and return. The fifth and sixth or so lines will look like this:

PhysMem: 68.0M wired, 67.5M active, 208M inactive, 343M used, 425M free

VM: 3.25G + 51.5M 5894(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

Gives you RAM and Virt Mem info.

I frequently get down to basically nothing free, the item to watch is pageouts. It is reads FROM the vm files.

AquaMon also does a nice job of giving this information.


AquaMon

[businezguy]

Does this mean that OS X has memory leaks? I am running Jaguar with the new dual 1 ghz Powermac and right now I have only 256 megs of memory. My computer has been up for 9 days now. Are you saying that the available memory is going down with time?

[msuper69]

Originally posted by businezguy:
Does this mean that OS X has memory leaks? I am running Jaguar with the new dual 1 ghz Powermac and right now I have only 256 megs of memory. My computer has been up for 9 days now. Are you saying that the available memory is going down with time?

It's more likely one of your apps has a memory leak.

[tenchi71]

Originally posted by msuper69:


It's more likely one of your apps has a memory leak.

I have been getting this same problem since installing 10.2 (Fresh install on an initialized drive)
I run nothing out of the ordinary (Entourage, Omniweb,etc.), but after a little while, Aquamon reports that I only have about 20-10MB Free. Doesn't matter what I'm running, or if I'm running nothing... after time it drops drastically. The only way I have founf to correct it is to run MacJanitor. You'll see the free memory just rise up. For some reason, OSX is leaking memory from somewhere, creating page files, and not releasing them. I have to run MacJanitor several times a day if I want a responsive system. BTW, I have like 700MB of RAM on my system, and like I said, I never saw this problem prior to 10.2.

[malvolio]

I wonder if Jaguar just caches things in RAM more aggressively than 10.1.x. Are you noticing degraded system & application performance?
A handy way to keep track of free memory is keeping Memory Monitor in your Dock. I do.

[tenchi71]

Originally posted by malvolio:
I wonder if Jaguar just caches things in RAM more aggressively than 10.1.x. Are you noticing degraded system & application performance?
A handy way to keep track of free memory is keeping Memory Monitor in your Dock. I do.

I sure am! like I said in my post, the only way to fix this is to run MacJanitor for a boost, or reboot for full speed restoration. It's VERY strange and annoying.

[malvolio]

I suspect that the culprit might be OmniWeb. I've noticed that quitting it after it's been running for a while frees up a lot of memory.

[DanMacMan]

Originally posted by malvolio:
I suspect that the culprit might be OmniWeb. I've noticed that quitting it after it's been running for a while frees up a lot of memory.

I agree, I've recently switched to Chimera and this phenomena has ceased.

[CheesePuff]

Originally posted by DanMacMan:


I agree, I've recently switched to Chimera and this phenomena has ceased.

I don't touch OmniWeb with a 10 foot pole.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:


I don't touch OmniWeb with a 10 foot pole.

My laptop has been up for 14 days now. I have 115MB free. Chimera does have a problem, though, that after a while, it will just sit there chewing up processor time. I quit it and start over again. Many apps aren't perfect.

[snerdini]

Mozilla 1.1 seems to suffer from the slow bloat effect as well (probably just a nasty memory leak). One day things ground to a halt on my DP 867 at work, and I couldn't figure out what the problem was until I fired up top. Ah HAH says I! Moz was using over 300 megs of RAM...

Quit and relaunched and everything was back to normal...

[DSHwrd]

It's my understanding (which could be wrong, I've asked around about it) that this 'Memory Leak' isn't a memory leak at all. It's the OS freely allocating memory and using it when you need it. So, it will appear to not be there, but it will really be there. To prove this point, look at your pageouts. Do you have any? If you're answer is no, and you're 'Free RAM is still about 10MB' all the time, then this 'theory' is correct.

Like someone else posted, using MacJanitor will fix this.

[benh57]

Originally posted by DSHwrd:
It's my understanding (which could be wrong, I've asked around about it) that this 'Memory Leak' isn't a memory leak at all. It's the OS freely allocating memory and using it when you need it. So, it will appear to not be there, but it will really be there. To prove this point, look at your pageouts. Do you have any? If you're answer is no, and you're 'Free RAM is still about 10MB' all the time, then this 'theory' is correct.

Like someone else posted, using MacJanitor will fix this.

Yes. You do not want "Free" RAM. You WANT all your RAM to be used.

Pageouts are the ONLY thing to worry about, period..

-Ben

[tenchi71]

Originally posted by benh57:



Yes. You do not want "Free" RAM. You WANT all your RAM to be used.

Pageouts are the ONLY thing to worry about, period..

-Ben

Oh, I get like 69% Pageouts on the average when my "Free Memory" is down to like 10MB. Like I said, only thing that "fixes" it is running MacJanitor, and only for a little bit.
PowerMac G4 400
702MB RAM
I think I should have enough RAM. I never saw this issue with 10.1.x
I'm not running anything out of ther ordinary, and the memory does drop even after a cold boot and I leave it on for a while with out running any apps in the foreground.

[iKevin]

Originally posted by CheesePuff:


I don't touch OmniWeb with a 10 foot pole.

OW is so inferior it's amazing that people actually have it installed anymore.

OW...forever beta. That should be their motto.

[Vanquish]

I noticed this too, but after opening System Profiler the memory began to free up back to 420 MB or so (total is 640 MB). I don't think it has anything to do with system profiler tough (would be strange). But in jaguar when you close an app it doesn't free up the amount of ram that it was using.

[mmurray]

While we are talking RAM can someone explain what the important things are here?

I have PB G4 400 with 640MB real ram. Top says

Processes: 54 total, 4 running, 50 sleeping... 139 threads 12:53:02
Load Avg: 2.06, 1.52, 1.26 CPU usage: 57.6% user, 42.4% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 115, resident = 28.1M code, 2.67M data, 8.92M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 4054, resident = 81.4M + 12.5M private, 91.7M shared
PhysMem: 62.0M wired, 94.4M active, 281M inactive, 437M used, 203M free
VM: 1.85G + 66.0M 17031(0) pageins, 7809(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
21500 Acrobat Re 0.4% 2:18.52 2 77 253 6.45M 18.8M 17.5M 73.2M
13287 SecurityAg 0.0% 0:02.82 2 74 85 1.57M 6.73M 3.42M 45.7M
5387 top 8.4% 0:01.16 1 14 18 260K 376K 556K 13.6M
5380 tcsh 0.0% 0:00.12 1 10 16 352K 716K 816K 5.73M
5379 login 0.0% 0:01.15 1 12 33 240K 428K 564K 13.7M
.
.
(more precesses deleted)
.
.
If I have 203MB free why do I have any pageouts at all ?


Thanks - Michael

[malvolio]

That figure represents page-outs since your last login, IIRC. The (0) after it is your page-outs for recent use (I forget how often the default update runs).
The VSIZE column on the right shows how much total memory (physical, virtual, whatever) is being used each application.
You do seem to have a high ratio of page-outs to page-ins. I ran top just now, and had 12,784 page-ins and 12 page-outs. This is on a G3 iMac 500 MHz with 768 MB of RAM.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by mmurray:

If I have 203MB free why do I have any pageouts at all ?


Thanks - Michael

Those pageouts are since you booted. The thing to watch:

run: "vm_stat 1" in the terminal. Move the terminal window down to the bottom of the screen, below open windows, so you can see it as it is print out. Watch the column on the far right (pageouts) when you think you don't have enough memory and when your system is bogging down. If there are no pageouts (or very small pageouts), then you are seeing very little to no speed loss due to too much memory usage. Remember that 1 page is 4kB, so it's virtually nothing. If you see several seconds of very large numbers of pageouts, then whatever it is that you are trying to do at that moment, (including every open program) you don't have enough memory to do it, so something is going to disk. If you don't see pageouts when your system is slowing down, it's not a significant memory issue. If you see pageins, then more memory could help, but only if you leave your system running for a long time and don't clean out the disk cache.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by malvolio:
That figure represents page-outs since your last login, IIRC. The (0) after it is your page-outs for recent use (I forget how often the default update runs).
The VSIZE column on the right shows how much total memory (physical, virtual, whatever) is being used each application.
You do seem to have a high ratio of page-outs to page-ins. I ran top just now, and had 12,784 page-ins and 12 page-outs. This is on a G3 iMac 500 MHz with 768 MB of RAM.

A high ratio doesn't necessarily mean anything though. A single program with a bad memory leak can get that number pretty high pretty quickly. I have 640MB in my iBook. I'm writing a program that I know has memory leaks in it somewhere. However, when it's not running, I don't see pageouts. So, I know I have enough ram for everything else that I'm doing. BUT, I do have a high ratio--relative to yours.

ALSO, if you only run a single program at a time, it would be really hard to get any pageouts--especially with that kind of RAM in the machine. If you never close programs--leave them all open so you don't have to launch them again later--then eventually, you'll get pageouts. I figure that's faster than launching the program from scratch. For example: iCal takes 16 bounces on my machine. The terminal takes 3. I don't mind closing and reopening the terminal.

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

If your RAM is "loose" perhaps you should try some glue or something

[Vanquish]

Just open top and Apple System profiler and watch yout free memory go sky high ! , I tested this 3 times and it worked 3 times. (it works for me , also: it doesn't change immediately you have to wait for the "gathering information" progressbar to disappear, after that one goes away you'll get you memory back). I do think this is a 10.2 bug.

[cutterjohn]

Originally posted by iKevin:


OW is so inferior it's amazing that people actually have it installed anymore.

OW...forever beta. That should be their motto.

In the early days of OSX OW was a nice option v. Internet Exploder.

But you are correct now, Omni seems to be in OW5 will fix EVERYTHING vaporware mode while continuously hacking OW4 so that it sort of works with every crap little web page. I'd be more impressed if they shoved a sneaky peek of OW5 out the door that actually fixed the deficiencies of OW4. (Go read the 4.1sp thread in software, and see how the omniites zealously protect Omni when comparing OW to REAL browsers. I'd bet that zero fo them even paid for OW, like I did... OW still looks the best though, when it actually manages to render a page.)

BTW: I noticed similar memory usage problems on a Pismo G3/500 640M, but I don't recall if I had been running OW at the time. I had 8, yes EIGHT swap files, and a few HUNDRED thousand pageouts!

I rebooted, back to the usual 1 swap file, compiled X11 bunch of other stuff, still one swap file... Either Apple fixed something that broke some apps that had otherwise worked around something for 10.1.x or a bug that was otherwise handled/contained by 10.1.x are now exposed.

[Boochie]

The component of MacJanitor that frees up all the RAM is the rebuilding of the "locate" database. Is this a coincidence or is there a memory leak associated with some in-memory cache of this database?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by cutterjohn:


In the early days of OSX OW was a nice option v. Internet Exploder.

But you are correct now, Omni seems to be in OW5 will fix EVERYTHING vaporware mode while continuously hacking OW4 so that it sort of works with every crap little web page. I'd be more impressed if they shoved a sneaky peek of OW5 out the door that actually fixed the deficiencies of OW4. (Go read the 4.1sp thread in software, and see how the omniites zealously protect Omni when comparing OW to REAL browsers. I'd bet that zero fo them even paid for OW, like I did... OW still looks the best though, when it actually manages to render a page.)

BTW: I noticed similar memory usage problems on a Pismo G3/500 640M, but I don't recall if I had been running OW at the time. I had 8, yes EIGHT swap files, and a few HUNDRED thousand pageouts!

I rebooted, back to the usual 1 swap file, compiled X11 bunch of other stuff, still one swap file... Either Apple fixed something that broke some apps that had otherwise worked around something for 10.1.x or a bug that was otherwise handled/contained by 10.1.x are now exposed.

...for me the killers are the memory leak and lack of tabs (although Chimera has been behaving badly lately, so I've been using OW). I never run into a page it can't render at all, and only a few with glitches. Fix the memory/performance issues and add tabs (exactly what OW5 is supposed to do) and I'll switch back to using it. For the time being though, I'll stick with Chimera.

[Wevah]

Offtopic:

"OW is so inferior it's amazing that people actually have it installed anymore."

I have it installed.....to see how all my beautiful CSS breaks in a noncompliant browser.

OW: Great UI, horrid support for Web standards. Here's hoping v5 kicks some ass, eh?

;]