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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR

"In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a major bug-fix for Lion. But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release."

I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a decent 3Gb RAM Core 2 MBP. Windows comparatively flies on the same machine but of course suspend resume is flaky and other Win-Mac integration annoyances mean it's not a win-win.

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In my n = 1 study, I can (sadly) report that memory management is the same as it was in Lion. Some people are reporting that it's improved, but I'm not sure they ever had the evil beach ball spinning as much as I did on an early 2011 MB Pro with 4 GB of ram. Terminal, Chrome with ~12 tabs, iTunes, Spotify, Dictionary, Sublime Text, Transmission, and Notational Velocity will bring my laptop to a grinding halt. There's no reason for this. I used to be able to have three times as many applications open in Snow Leopard, Ubuntu, and Windows machines before. Mountain Lion still requires me to reboot about twice a day to be usable. I'm not sure what the hell Apple has done to its OS's memory management recently, but it makes me sad.

8 GB of RAM is really cheap, your 2011 MBP can handle it, and it's stupid simple to install. Not that that mitigates any of your points about memory management, just offering a suggestion to make your life better; my same-era MBP felt like a new machine after upgrading.

Ha, funny that you suggest that. I literally just popped in my two modules less than an hour ago. I ordered an 8 GB kit off NewEgg for $40 shipped. I have no complaints anymore since I pretty much always have 4 GB available at all times. I just wanted to make due with what I had and have it work decently since I'm thrifty.

Is memory management the key to why Linux always seems to handle much better than OS X on the same machines? I'm puzzled this problem still exists (with 10.7).

3GB, my word, son...crucial.com is your friend!

The machine supports a maximum of 4GB, and believe me it only gets marginally better with the added 1GB.

I guess Crucial also sells SSDs and Apple sells new MBPs with 16GB RAM :) - but at this juncture I hate to spend money on anything when the other supposedly more bloated OS named Win 7 works just great with 3GB - that seriously ought to be more than enough for browsing, email and occassional Word/PPT stuff.

As for the swappiness - it seems to be at least somewhat better than Lion - hasn't used up swap after 20 minutes of doing normal stuff. But the Apple ID/Password annoyance is still there - I still had to enter Apple ID / password several times during and after the installation! The last time hopefully was for iTunes. Why can't they use one single sign on?

Agreed. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my 4GB MBP to 16GB of memory. Officially unsupported, but it works like a charm.

May I ask what MBP you have?

Any 2011 15" MBP or newer will take 16gb of RAM, unofficially. You can check OWC for a full compatibility guide.

May I ask which brand you bought and for how much?

I'd strongly recommend getting that extra 1GB if you're looking for a cheap way to boost performance (even if you have to buy 2x2GB sticks). It's not marginal by any means if your OS is swapping - it will probably be a dramatic increase in performance!

Also, regarding doctoboggan's comment about SSDs: SSDs are still an order of magnitude slower than system RAM. The reason they're so nice is because they're an order of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs, but that doesn't mean you can get away with skimping on RAM.

Even my Late 2009 Macbook White is able to handle 8GB of RAM (unoficially) and that's what I've done.

Also, I've installed a SSD.

If you're on any of the Aluminum MacBooks (2008 included) the specs are actually under-representing what the machine can handle. My Core2 has 8GB RAM and I have yet to feels the need to upgrade other than coveting the new high res display of course. Then again I'm also still using 10.6.8 and with the issues I've heard of there's no compelling reason to upgrade yet.

Win-Mac integration annoyances mean it's not a Win-Win

I laughed

Ha! (Unintentional tbh)

I am not an expert but I would guess Apple doesn't care too much about repeated memory swapping because they are trying to switch to SSDs. I have a SSD in both my personal and work computer and I have no problems with memory management.

Repeated swapping to an SSD wears it out faster.

Mountain Lion does in fact swap less than Lion due to some VM improvements.

If a machine is at all usable with a mechanical swap disk, then there's not enough swapping happening to worry about the effect on the longevity of an SSD.

Sometimes I'm not sure which side of the "at all usable with a mechanical swap disk" line OS X is on. It certainly tested the boundaries of my personal threshold of "usable", at least. Spinny beach ball, spinny, spinny ball.

Switching to a MacBook Air and thus solid-state storage made OS X an entirely new operating system for me. I'm in no hurry to ever use it on a spinning platter disk again.

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