When I upgraded the RAM on my former iMac 24”, Snow Leopard, from 4 to 8 GB I saw hardly any difference. Applications as well as the System would unabashedly spread in the memory and clog the 8 GB just as they did with the 4 GB (checked in Activity Monitor).
I installed 16 GB on my new Mini, with Mavericks, and it's basically the same thing with practically the same number of open applications. Mavericks loads dozens of utilities one wonders what they are really for. Many applications, like Firefox, don't free the memory they don't use anymore when you close windows. DxO OpticsPro does the same. kernel_task is currently occupying 2.37 GB. It's regularly 4GB and sometimes 8GB.
My feeling is that when applications and the OS see free memory they just rush on it. As a result some applications are slowed and sometimes crash, freeze or won't start.
One solution is to quit applications you don't use but you have to restart them later and it's cumbersome.
To me there are applications that have a responsible citizen's behavior, they take the RAM space they need and then roll it back when they don't use it anymore. Same thing on the HD with their caches, their hidden files and so on.
Other apps are careless and selfish, they take as much space as they can find and never free it. OS X is one of them.
I think it should the OS responsibility to enforce some kind of policy.
It doesn't so we have to do it in its place.
***
Do we need to talk about what's easy on a computer?
My first big thing after my Mac 512 was a
Mac IIcx in 1989. You didn't even need a screwdriver to pop up the top and you exposed all the guts of the beast. There was 3 NuBus slots, one being used by the GPU. OK there wasn't any extension card on the market at that time. ;-) There was 8 RAM slots with four already used ones, so you could
add memory, not replace the existing one… which was 4 MG (1)!
Later I had a
Power Mac G4. One side was a door with just a nob to open it. I had also an aluminum
Power Mac G5.
Whatever you needed to do with these machines, between the moment you shut down the Mac and the moment you restarted it, without unplugging anything, it took at most 5 minutes, like on a PC… That's what I call easy. If takes any longer and if you need to download and print a how-to from iFixIt then it's not easy.
Nick
1) Yes megabytes! At that time 1 MB modules were ~$200 a pop. A year later for that price I could get the four. I still own it.
