Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers
by falcolas on Monday August 08, 2016 @09:49AM
(#12247702)
My experience mirrors yours on this front. I have several macs, one of which is an older mac mini with a traditional hard drive, which has become less usable as OS updates come in. However, the moment you replace the traditional drive with an SSD, the OS becomes responsive again.
Re:Apple should stop selling four-year-old computers
by ksec on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:09AM
(#12247056)
Thanks, exactly the same thing happen to me and I thought the performance characteristic is different.
But if that is true ( Which align with my own experience ) this would really annoy me. SSD or not, it should ALWAYS fill up the memory first.
As Apple started moving to SSD's, I believe they stopped caring about minimizing disk seeking when considering changes to their virtual memory implementation. I had a Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a spinning-rust hard drive, and was constantly getting beachballs when switching between applications (I had FREE RAM and was getting beachballs!!!).
(Apple's ~2012 virtual memory behavior was a strange beast -- it appears it would page an application's memory out to disk so that it could hang on to some disk cache. This was different than what I had become used to in Linux, which always prioritizes application memory needs above disk cache).
Disabling the pagefile solved the beachballs, but with the downside that when I did run out of RAM, the machine basically ground to a halt. I later upgraded that machine to use an SSD, re-enabled the pagefile, and was back to smooth running.
Is bloat the problem? Possibly. More likely it was shifting priorities (minimizing pagefile access probably just wasn't a priority anymore).