- Joined
- Dec 16, 2013
- Messages
- 222
- Motherboard
- GA-Z87MX-D3H
- CPU
- i5-4670K
- Graphics
- HD4600
I'm looking forward to hearing from those who get one of these new Macs next week, on the topic of what the real world performance is like. How does your daily workflow go and how much ram does get used ? How often do you tap the page file and does it slow down because of that ?
I'm choosing your post somewhat randomly because it's about ram...so forgive me.
I have a macbook air 11" that I quite like because it's tiny and easy to carry around. Except for occasional attempts to use it while travelling for photography, it's mostly a web/computer noodling/minor office tasks computer. But the thing is, because it's so tiny, I use it a LOT. It's really only painfully slow when using it for heavier tasks - which I try not to do because, well, see below.
Unfortunately it only has 4gigs of ram. And 128gig ssd. (It was a gift that ended up in my hands, so excuse the under-speccing.)
So I undertook a task of cleaning it up, removing a lot of the trash/random files (it's always been close to full main drive), removing some apps that I don't use on it, etc.
With the mojave update yesterday, the memory pressure got almost critically bad - constantly in the yellow zone and too often in red. Worse than it's ever been (was manageable before). [Side note I used to kind of mock the memory pressure graph as vague and unclear what it was measuring - but now I find it's the single best indicator of a problem, if it's in red, it's memory swapping and houston, there is a problem.]
Big surprise, at least I've never gone out of my way to do this before: cleaning/rebuilding the dyld-shared caches made a huge difference. Now it's comfortably in the green on memory pressure and way more predictable and better performance. AFter that I decided to run Onyx as well and clean out a lot of stuff. (I didn't do the more aggressive stuff like cleaning all browser caches and that - so it was somewhat conservative)
It also seems to have freed up (no idea how exactly) a pretty significant chunk of disk space too.
So wow, what a difference. Worth it. I apologise as this is probably well known to others - and probably there are reasons not to, my issue for having an old computer I've updated without a nuke-and-rebuild ever, but in my case was worthwhile.