Hi guys. I'm having problem with my system osx 10.9.4. It's eating all my memory. I have 12gb and, my system is saying the systen has run out of memory sometimes. I'm wondering which osx system you consider good for audio? Thanks

 

What VSTs are you normally using? Are you closing memory intensive apps running the the background before sessions? I have 3 Mac OS X systems, all 10.9.4, 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB memory. All of them run fine. We need more information on your setup.

Also I remember someone recently posted a guide on optimizing your Mac for audio production. Search the forums for that post.

 

Hey Maduka I used to have that same problem on 10.8 and realized it was because I hadn't turned off my mac for like 4 months, I always left it on sleep mode.
After turning it off and on the problem was resolved.
If that doesn't work you can open up your terminal and type "sudo purge" then enter your password and hit return.
I never had that issue on 10.9.2.
Cheers!

 

He–he best osx system (for me) is MAC OSX 10.5.8 Leopard!!
You want believe it but even if it's only with 800 MB memory left it runs smooth and stable.
Since years I use the ±same setup without serious issues. Okay i admit that you can't run
all the new shitloads-plugins appearing nowadays but who needs all that??

Want a good advice? Never hoard too much stuff on your machine!
Also don't forget to clean up your Caches from time to time…
…for instance Web browsers can eat up a lot of memory, same for
Windows emulations, Wine, Keygen related stuff etc.
And last, don't collect too much sample libraries.

 

You should try memory clean, its free!
But Mavericks should be clean automaticaly, a reinstalo must do the job.
Old plugs Snowden leo, new plugs mountain lion and up... But really depends your software and hardware.

 

You don't need any extra tools.
Open terminal and run the following command:

top -o mem

And you'll see an ordered list of processes, sorted by memory consumption, hungriest individuals @ the top
You can quit top by hitting the "Q" key.

If you copy the output (or do a screenshot) and post it here, we might in fact be able to help.

 

Thanks guys all for replying. this is happening after updating to osx.10.9.4. the kernel_task is eating my memory using like 1gb of memory. the funny thing is that in my Macbook with lion 10.7.5 kernel task is using 106MB. thanks

 

Under 10.9.0, kernel_task eats around 350MB on an 8GB machine and around 900MB on a 16GB machine. (might be different on other machines depending on many factors)
But this is still far away from your 12GB total.

What value does top write at the end of the 3rd line saying "xxxxM unused." ?

 

I would go for 10.8.5 (I actually would go for 10.6.8 if it wasn't almost left without support).
Running out of mem with 12GB is strange
Don't you have maybe some faulty kernel extension? iLok legit stuff installed? I heard time ago of PACE kexts eating much
more memory than usual.
I'm no guru when it comes to kernel stuff, maybe a kext built for another osx version that run bad on Mavericks?
Just guessing, maybe fiction can shed some light on this, as it seems he know what he's talkin about

 

Well, let's await maduka's response.
If Maduka sees kernel_task at the top of the list, it's already the largest process at around 1GB so I suppose he still had plenty of memory free the last time he checked.

@Maduka: Leave top running in a terminal while you work (it won't hurt!), and as soon as you run out of memory again, have a close look at the first few processes in the list. Also don't forget to watch the "....M unused." value. You might be able to help yourself then.

 

Hi guys. This a screenshot from my activity monitor. what do you think? Thanks

 

one thing you Need to Do if you have not already is optimize your computer tern off every that is Not essential all your Clock date time goole optimize Mac alot of things in your dock can be turned off evry thing that Go's on in the Background that is not necessary you can also open you Activity monitor to see what is running you got to make a choice is your Mac that cost a few thousand dollars going to be for social media and to see what time it is or dedicated to Music production

 

That is more than normal *yes*
Now mine looks like this, as you can see more memory than you eaten by kernel_task.

I'm on 10.8.5 btw, and it's that high also because computer is on from this morning,
and I worked all day with Hopper disassembler (requiring) and I ran fseventer for half an hour (requiring too, a lot).
I just have 4GB memory, but as you can see it's still usable.
Also, I have lot of wasted memory (the blue one in pie chart), as I didn't purged it in the last hour.

 

As copylefter already said, nothing to worry about.

I can't see a single music program running!
Your machine is eagerly awaiting its musical defloration!



@copylefter:
So you actually do manual purges from time to time?
Shouldn't inactive memory get purged automatically as soon as memory gets too low?

From my understanding, inactive memory is mainly inactive apps' memory and data that may wait for being written to disk. Or memory leaks from buggy apps ;-)

 

Thanks guys for all your comments. I will continue checking. I also noticed JDownloarder and Firefox eat a lot memory.

 

When I took this sceenshot, I was not using Ableton either Cubase *yes*

 

It "should" but it doesn't. I end many times with machine totally unresponsive cause there's 10MB left in memory,
but inactive is maybe 1GB, what a waste
It mainly happen when disassembling big binaries in Hopper or IDA, and when logging massive amount of actions with fseventer.
Surely there are many other apps that will do the same, probably video converters/rippers, dunno, I don't use 'em.
Sadly many apps have the bad habit to leave memory allocated after quit,
and it's not so automatic that it get purged automagically.
Many times i have to purge it the manual way.
Terminal:

Code:

purge      ### -> hit enter

Or one of the plenty of apps that are made for this (every single one just doing: do shell script "purge", so it's the same).

 

Thanks for the info. I've never run into this problem, and at the few occasions I've run fseventer, I've only let it run for a short enough time so I didn't run into memory limits. Then grep, sed and awk are my friends.
Where do you get your little tools from? Macports? fink? Pre-compiled or the hard way?

 

Almost always precompiled, I', not very familiar with MacPorts