Comment by obituary_latte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obituary_latte | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't recognize any of his symptoms anyway, and my OS X computers get pretty RAM-heavy use, with almost always a linux VM open, XCode, Safari with ~10 tabs, iTunes with a few thousand songs, etc.

Oh boy I wish I could say the same. Admittedly I don't shut down on a daily basis but this didn't used to be a problem in SL. FWIW I've an old tank of a tower that has a video card on its last leg.. shutting down invariably leads to ~30 minutes of downtime while the card heats up and reconnects whatever needs reconnecting for both monitors to work.

Since Lion, I've noticed frequent hangs and beach-balls when doing even menial tasks. Transmit, terminal, texmate, a few tabs in chrome. If time machine starts backing up I can forget about a smooth Preview open or switching to a largish open textmate file without beach-ball'ing. If I want to use a Win7 Parallels VM--I can't do anything else. Even now as I type this I have a ubuntu vm running at the login screent and it causes the machine to shake off the cobwebs between almost everything.

It's certainly not a bad machine--there's 8gb ram, and tons of diskspace--good processor. In fact, I would go multiple months without a reboot and heavy use when on SL without hardly any problems at all.

Then there is the new i5 MBPro. Cool trick you can do: hook up an external monitor via thunderbolt and watch as the [left side] dock becomes a mangled mess with icons miss-positioned and wrongly triggering apps--it's like playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to open terminal to kill -KILL dock :)

The i5 has also been less than stellar compared to the older MBPro I sold to buy it in terms of performance.

For what it's worth, I'm running Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and I see the same sort of terrible performance the article describes.

Though I did improve matters drastically by telling mds not to index my (Linux) MP3 server and my Time Machine drive. That made it go from nearly unusable to just frequently annoying.

The other crazy thing I've been seeing is it routinely takes Chrome minutes to shutdown -- in fact, pretty much every time I try to reboot my MBP without shutting down Chrome first, the shutdown process times out trying to exit Chrome.

Ah yes. The dreaded Chrome renderer never enderer.

I too have experienced the Chrome issue enough that I don't even try to close it normally anymore. Force quit is the only way I exit Chrome. Thankfully, the restore tabs functionality works well.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. This drives me crazy every time.

Firefox 12 does this too, on both my MB Pro and iMac. I think it has to flush so many caches that disk I/O just takes forever. This is purely conjecture, though.

Not sure if it will help, but have you tried running Firefox's hidden profile manager and created a new profile? Firefox was horrible to run on OS X for me, it would drag the whole system down, but since changing to a new profile it has run like a dream and not reverted back.

Creating a new FF profile made a significant difference for me, too, when I did it recently (for the first time in a couple years). I suspect that will be true on any OS, if you do a fair amount of installing and removing extensions, user scripts, etc.

"Vacuuming" your Firefox profile's .sqlite files also helps.

I had to shut down on a daily basis because of this problem with my system having only 4 GB of ram. There is definitely something broken in there.

http://i.imgur.com/ohBEF.png

I don't see anything wrong in this picture. You still have free memory. Even if it didn't show free memory you would probably still be OK, because it would just be reserved for use

In that case it should be marked as inactive memory so it can be reused, that memory that was taken up by the end of the day would never be reclaimed so I was paging a lot.

>In that case it should be marked as inactive memory so it can be reused

That would be the job of the memory manager to decide when to do that. Memory could be kept in the non-free state for longer that it actually is needed, but still be marked internally to be available when needed.

OTOH, if you have paging, as you say, then something is wrong, true.

But I don't think that the screenshot shows something wrong.

And not to change the subject, but why does my instance of Dashboard need 340M of RAM? I have maybe 5-6 widgets. Is this thing spawning WebKit for each one?

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