Mountain Lion upgrade?

[glvr]

Currently running Lion 10.7.5 on my 24-inch Mid 2007 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with 6GB ram), I'm wondering about an upgrade to Mountain Lion, and whether things will likely be slower after upgrade.

[chabig]

Your machine will not be slower. Upgrading is a no-brainer.

[glvr]

Quote: Originally Posted by chabig Your machine will not be slower. Upgrading is a no-brainer.

Thanks.

As the Apple-stated ram requirement (Leopard 512mb, Snow Leopard 1gb, Lion 2gb) increases with each upgrade, it's the potential for overall sluggishness and/or running out of memory when available ram is shared among other apps which bothers me - and moreso as mine is the earliest of the supported models, with less power and ram.

It's an issue I've noticed since upgrading to Lion from Snow Leopard, and don't want to further worsen things. (Years back, switching my then iMac to OS X from OS 9 was horrid - sure, it did all sorts of useful stuff, but overall it was much slower and frequently ran out of memory.)

As the Mountain Lion requirement of 2gb is the same as Lion, maybe things will be ok.

[hayne]

The recommended procedure for system upgrades is to first make a full bootable backup of your disk (using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). This copy goes on an external disk drive. Then do the upgrade. If you don't like it, just do the disk copy in the reverse direction to get back to where you were.

[chabig]

I think you will be fine, especially with 6GB of RAM. Under the hood I don't think Mountain Lion is as significantly different from Lion as Lion was from Snow Leopard. If you are still concerned, install Mountain Lion on an external drive and try it (keeping in mind that an external drive will likely be a bit slower than your internal drive).

Or do as Hayne suggested and clone the internal drive to the external. Then you will experience Mountain Lion from the internal drive.

[benwiggy]

I updated my 2006 iMac from Tiger, through each OS, all the way to Lion. I have to say that each new OS seemed at least as fast as the previous one, if not more responsive and "snappy". That on an ageing Mac with 3Gb of RAM.
Mountain Lion also runs very well on my 2009 MacBook with 4Gb of RAM.

Generally, the last few OSes have reduced clutter (ancient APIs, Rosetta, etc), and have been pretty lean. The fact that RAM requirements increase is not a sign that the OS itself is more portly.

Comparing upgrading +1 version of OS X to the difference between OS 9 and early versions of OS X is .... well, not a good comparison.

[agentx]

I have migrated 90% of my Lion users to Mountain Lion as Lion was Apple's Vista ;-)....unfinished, unpolished and pretty damn buggy IMHO.

Also many of teh outstanding issues will not be sorted out as Apple are trying to get us to do upgrades every year ! or certainly 2 years.

[anthlover]

LI 10.7.5 is fine, but ML 10.8.2 is more polished and is zippier while adding a few features. For the record ML is basically the polished spiffy version of LI the same way Snow was for Leopard.

Also Apps are starting to be ML only.

You will not regret the upgrade. You should of course back up. Upgrades work very well... Although purists will rightly tell you from scratch is best, the upgrade process goes very well.

Also if it helps I am running ML on Collection of equipment that is all Core 2, both 4 and 8gb of ram.

[glvr]

Thanks, everyone. Appreciated.
Upgrade done; it appears faster, certainly isn't slower, no out-of-memory problems.

[benwiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by glvr no out-of-memory problems.

Can I ask what do you mean by this? The only thing that should happen when there's not enough memory is that you start paging to disk. That might bring a slight performance penalty, but with 6Gb, I wouldn't expect much of this, unless you've got several large pro apps all running at the same time.

My old 3Gb Mac certainly paged out, but could I tell you when it was doing that, from any observable behaviour? No.

If you have an SSD as your system drive, then not only will that make things much zippier than before, but it will also minimize any noticeable paging out. That's the most useful thing you can do to remove any worries about sluggishness and lack of response.

[glvr]

Quote: Originally Posted by benwiggy Can I ask what do you mean by this?

Not knowing too much about this, I've noticed that Macs often gradually 'use-up' almost all memory when left on, even with little or nothing running.

Apparently the memory becomes 'inactive' and is still available for use, but nonetheless things can become unreasonably slow with long delays in opening windows, switching apps etc.

For this reason, I currently use 'Free Memory' app to monitor what's happening and then when appropriate purge to reclaim memory - whereupon performance increases significantly.

On my own machine, this issue has become more noticeable and greater with progressive upgrades through Leopard and Lion, hence my concern for possible worsening with the ML upgrade.

[hayne]

Quote: Originally Posted by glvr For this reason, I currently use 'Free Memory' app to monitor what's happening and then when appropriate purge to reclaim memory - whereupon performance increases significantly.

I think any performance increase due to artificial (via utility) purging of inactive memory is very likely to have been illusory.

The system (OS X) tries to use as much RAM as you have available - unused RAM is wasted RAM - and only swaps to disk when necessary.

[glvr]

Quote: Originally Posted by hayne I think any performance increase due to artificial (via utility) purging of inactive memory is very likely to have been illusory.

Ah, but it's not illusory...

When I had just 3gb ram there were times when it'd take nearly a minute to switch spaces from Thunderbird to Firefox even though both were already open and running.

After a memory purge, performance improved significantly.

With 6gb I still get the issue, but it's less severe.

[chabig]

You've got other problems then. Memory won't cause an app switch to take a minute. Maybe you need a new hard drive what kind is it and how free space is on it?

[glvr]

Quote: Originally Posted by chabig You've got other problems then. Memory won't cause an app switch to take a minute. Maybe you need a new hard drive what kind is it and how free space is on it?

Without wishing to be rude, as I mentioned: 'After a memory purge, performance improved significantly.' To me, that seems to clearly define this as a memory-induced slowdown.

[hayne]

There is a basic assumption in the OS X software that the hardware is working well and that there is lots of disk space. If that is not true, many strange things can happen.
E.g. if you don't have enough disk space (your disk is almost full), or if your disk is very slow for some other reason (hardware failure, etc) then perhaps crude work-arounds like manually purging inactive memory may indeed have a useful effect.

[benwiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by glvr When I had just 3gb ram there were times when it'd take nearly a minute to switch spaces from Thunderbird to Firefox even though both were already open and running.

I have to agree that that isn't normal behaviour for OS X when all the RAM is in use. Something else is going on.
Perhaps there's not enough free disk space; or the disk is faulty somehow; or it may be that the .plist file for Spaces is corrupt; or some other issue.

[glvr]

As I'm no expert, all I can say is what I've noticed...

Like some others who've written elsewhere about the issue, some Macs slow just through 'being on and normal use' as memory used progressively rises and seemingly isn't released by some apps (including Firefox, Safari, Thunderbird).

I therefore use an app to monitor memory, and purge when it's low (it often gets down to 10mb when running specific apps). Doing so alerts me to and helps prevent potential slowdowns.

The purge from such apps is similar to using the terminal to do it, and watching the purge in Activity Monitor shows the app grabbing inactive memory and then quitting to release it.

The effect is similar to releasing memory by quitting various apps, except that the apps remain running but with less memory used.

This happens with lots of free space on a healthy drive, and so suggests a normal issue of slowdown through insufficient free memory.

[benwiggy]

Quote: Originally Posted by glvr some Macs slow just through 'being on and normal use' as memory used progressively rises and seemingly isn't released by some apps (including Firefox, Safari, Thunderbird).

There is no "performance inertia" inherent in the use of increasing amounts of RAM.
Whilst it's certainly true that some apps do have memory leaks and use more and more RAM, that in itself should not necessarily cause any slowness. Having all your RAM in use is not of itself a problem.

The only slowness should be caused by disk access when memory is swapped in and out. But even this should be a minor, momentary shudder, rather than the whole minute that you experience.
Which is why I say that your delays are not caused by the mere use of most or all of your RAM. (Though purging the Inactive Memory may have ended the problem, that doesn't mean that the RAM use is the problem, nor that it needs to be monitored manually.)

There are even PAID apps on the App Store that claim to "Free up your precious memory". It's nothing but Snake Oil, and seems to be "the new Repair Permissions".

I would investigate your system more closely than mere memory usage for the cause of this slowness.

[glvr]

Quote: Originally Posted by benwiggy I would investigate your system more closely than mere memory usage for the cause of this slowness.

Thanks, appreciated.