O.K. I was dying to try out the memory compression feature in OSX Mavericks. After the first boot post installation on my Macbook 2009, memory usage was 2.4/4.0 GB so it was just a bit more than the previous instalment of Snow Leopard.
However, after the update and reboot, memory usage was 3.9GB and I kinda panicked, thinking," Lord, not again...Gonna have to downgrade back to Snow Leopard". Someone very rightly said that "Snow Leopard is the Windows XP of Mac OSX...It simply will not die!
Another reboot later, things settled back to 2.4GB so that was good.
I opened up Safari (Still a memory hog! Apple, do something about it, for God's sake)...Opened a lot of tabs, opened Microsoft Word, iTunes, and few Finder windows....Virtual memory usage showed 4.5 GB, and I expected the swap file to be used and the thrashing of the hard disk, but NO! Apple's Compressed Memory was starting to work and it started going up to a few hundred megabytes.
So this is how it works. First, the programs use up all the available RAM and when that's about to finish, Compressed Memory comes into play. I really haven't overloaded the system with a lot more apps and intend to do so in a few days...Will post again.
Immediately, I uninstalled a program I'd been using for the last few months - FreeMemory. A very good utility, but rendered useless due to Apple's superb memory management.
Fantastic job, Apple!!!
