Mavericks unusually high RAM usage
I thought Mavericks was suppose to utilize RAM memory better, thus run smoother.
Running ML on Mac mini 2012, with 16GB RAM...always running smoothly even with over a dozen apps running.
Now, after installing Mavericks, my Mac is SLOW, eating up RAM like crazy! Looking over usage, of the 16GB of installed memory...on average it uses 10-14 GB RAM when barely running a few apps!!!
There is this kernel_task that is always running with over 1GB of RAM and most apps are not taking that much RAM, so what is using up all my RAM?! File cache? It shows very high in that new description, with about 1/3 of my total RAM
Who said that this memory use is bad in any way? At the very least, the OS will be using the memory so that it can spin down your hard drive at the first opportunity. Hard drive access is energetically expensive. RAM is already powered up, so letting it sit idle is truly wasteful.
The question is a yet another post in the style of "oh no my ram is all used up, bad [insert your bogeyman here]". Let's get it out of the way: RAM should be always fully utilized. You paid for it, you're paying to keep it powered up, it's really counterproductive for all this money to go to waste.
If your computer feels slow right after updating, it's true that the indexing service may be to blame. Let it stay on overnight, make sure you get a full Time Machine backup done, and see what transpires next. Don't get hung up over RAM consumption - without some rather technical understanding of what those numbers mean, you can't make any use of them. They are red herring. It's a curiously recurring pattern.
Have you checked if Spotlight is indexing the hard drive?
I found that for about 2 hours after installing Mavericks, my computers needed to perform this task, which took up a lot of system resources.
You can disable this indexing (guide here) and check whether it freed up any memory, which has been suggested by some to be the case in similar situations.
I am having the same problem, but also seeing a degradation in performance, system hangs and app crashes. I do photography and some of those apps, especially Lightroom, NEVER give up memory that they have taken, even after you quit them!
I talked to mac support and was told that if you open your apps to full screen/maximize, everything behind them will go into app nap mode. He said that is the best way to take advantage of Maverick memory capabilities - let each app take the whole screen and ctrl-tab between them. Unfortunately, that is not how I work,and doesn't work well for my needs. It might help you out tho.
I used to be able to do a "purge" from a terminal app and clear out unused memory, but maverick does not allow me to do that anymore. I would keep an eye on memory and just type purge now and then and things were fine. I am searching for a way to do that in Maverick. If not, I may have to do a restore from time machine as I am unable to do my work.
I installed Maverick more than 5 days ago so I would think it should be done indexing. macbook retina pro, 16gb, kernal is using 1.13gb, page file is about 8Gb.