New Intel CoreDuo Mac Mini is much slower than expected...

[IJ Reilly]

My thoughts exactly.

Although I appreciate IJ's thought that people shouldn't needlessly throw money into fixing a performance problem, I haven't seen a post yet where someone's added more memory to a 512MB machine and didn't "feel" a performance increase, be it an Apple machine, a Dell machine, an IBM ThinkPad, etc...

A doctor can give a patient a sugar pill and they will often say that they feel better. Of course this doesn't mean they actually are better, or that sugar cures diseases. It's the placebo affect.

I don't doubt that many people will report that a machine that "dragged" with 512 Mb now "flies" with more RAM, but short some sort of quantifiable metric to measure the performance impact of the upgrade (which should not be difficult to obtain, if the impact is real), then I will remain a skeptic.

 

[QCassidy352]

Bench tests are designed to approach real-world use, but in a controlled fashion.

Therein lies the problem. They in no way approach real-world use. These benchmarking utilities are well-intentioned, but they just aren't reliable or accurate enough for me to take even somewhat seriously (their results are neither internally consistent nor indicative of anything else).

I was as surprised as anyone to read the results of the testing. I would have expected some improvement in performance with the addition of RAM, if only marginally. The fact that this did not occur is perplexing, and I think worthy of further consideration -- not outright dismissal.

The experience of countless users says a lot more to me than numbers generated by one user doing tests with (as discussed above) near-meaningless utilities.

It's certainly possible that there's something of a placebo effect going on, but to suggest that an increase in RAM won't help performance is... strange. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm just baffled by your position here. Do you really not think this core duo mini would run much better with 1 GB or more RAM? Seriously?

Again, I'll say - check the page outs. When you have 1000's of them, you don't have enough RAM, and adding more will make a huge difference. You can call that "removed from actual performance," but I'm telling you, the OP is going to find thousands, and when he adds RAM they are going to go away, and he's going to be very pleased with his mini.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Therein lies the problem. They in no way approach real-world use. These benchmarking utilities are well-intentioned, but they just aren't reliable or accurate enough for me to take even somewhat seriously (their results are neither internally consistent nor indicative of anything else).

This impresses me as entirely a matter of opinion. Granted, some of the benchmarking applications are better and more consistent than others, but to dismiss all of them out of hand? No, I don't think so.

If you think all of the benchmarks being used now are so un-indicative of "real world" use (whatever that is), then devise your own test. It shouldn't be difficult to do.

The experience of countless users says a lot more to me than numbers generated by one user doing tests with (as discussed above) near-meaningless utilities.

It's certainly possible that there's something of a placebo effect going on, but to suggest that an increase in RAM won't help performance is... strange. I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm just baffled by your position here. Do you really not think this core duo mini would run much better with 1 GB or more RAM? Seriously?

Again, I'll say - check the page outs. When you have 1000's of them, you don't have enough RAM, and adding more will make a huge difference. You can call that "removed from actual performance," but I'm telling you, the OP is going to find thousands, and when he adds RAM they are going to go away, and he's going to be very pleased with his mini.

An increase in RAM will help if you are spinning off large VM swap files. Your Mac will obviously be thrashing the hard drive more in this case, which will be a performance penalty. How quickly these files are produced and how large they become depends on what you use the Mac for, and also how often you reboot it. I keep my vm directory sidebared and have monitored it extensively. I can run Keynote, Pages, Safari, Mail, Preview, iPhoto, iCal and TextEdit literally for days without building a single swap file on 1 gig of RAM. So I think it's quite possible to run Safari on half that without exceeding physical RAM, at least to the point of seriously impacting performance.

So as a generalization, no I don't think the Mini would necessarily run better on more RAM. Like most things, it depends.

 

[TheMac19]

Wow, thanks for all the support in this thread so far! Gotta admit, I thought I know a fair bit about these machines, but "page outs" - never heard of them before. What are they?

Speaking of which, the said mini has been pretty well behaved since a restart yesterday, although today's use has been relatively light. (Safari, Mail, Pages, Preview) I've left Activity Monitor running most of today, so I could steal a look over there, and here's what I discovered under System Memory: (obviously rough figures, as these are constantly changing...)

Page ins/outs: 72056/67131 (Don't know what these are - is that a lot?)
Wired: ~150 MB
Active: ~220 MB
Inactive: ~95 MB
Used: ~462 MB
Free: ~32 MB
VM Size: ~9.2 GB

I'd thought, probably foolishly, that I was relatively okay with RAM since I've always kept an eye on its usage with iStatNano, and I'd never seen it all used... Anyway, normally my kneejerk reaction to all machines is to max their RAM as well - I instantly did so with my powerbook. But this machine is my parents, and I'll have a hard time explaining to them how their magical "$500 Mac" actually cost over $1000. ($799 SuperDrive model, plus $50 for a modem, plus ~150 for RAM)

That said, I understand there is much debate over the matched pairs in the new Intel Macs. For those who think RAM is my answer, the question is this: What will be faster: Adding a 1GB chip for a total of 1256 MB non matched or adding a matched pair of 512's, for a total of 1024 MB?

 

[TheMac19]

Also, I just realised that although I'd thought I wasn't running anything under rosetta (except when my parents use AOL, ugh - why isn't that Universal yet?!?!)

Alas, there are several PowerPC apps running constantly, which perhaps might not be helping matters any. It appears that all 4 items all related to the new HP 1510 that we got with the Mini are all constantly running as "PowerPC" - as shown below.

696 HP IO Classic Proxy tommy 0.00 2 4.20 MB 390.82 MB PowerPC
695 HP IO Classic Proxy 2 tommy 0.00 2 4.19 MB 394.02 MB PowerPC
693 HP Event Handler tommy 0.00 4 3.24 MB 408.21 MB PowerPC
692 Print Daemon tommy 0.00 2 252.00 KB 97.61 MB PowerPC

I thought the HP drivers were up to date with being Universal, but apparently not. I just ran the HP update software, but it says I'm up to date...

 

[bousozoku]

Wow, thanks for all the support in this thread so far! Gotta admit, I thought I know a fair bit about these machines, but "page outs" - never heard of them before. What are they?

Speaking of which, the said mini has been pretty well behaved since a restart yesterday, although today's use has been relatively light. (Safari, Mail, Pages, Preview) I've left Activity Monitor running most of today, so I could steal a look over there, and here's what I discovered under System Memory: (obviously rough figures, as these are constantly changing...)

Page ins/outs: 72056/67131 (Don't know what these are - is that a lot?)
Wired: ~150 MB
Active: ~220 MB
Inactive: ~95 MB
Used: ~462 MB
Free: ~32 MB
VM Size: ~9.2 GB

I'd thought, probably foolishly, that I was relatively okay with RAM since I've always kept an eye on its usage with iStatNano, and I'd never seen it all used... Anyway, normally my kneejerk reaction to all machines is to max their RAM as well - I instantly did so with my powerbook. But this machine is my parents, and I'll have a hard time explaining to them how their magical "$500 Mac" actually cost over $1000. ($799 SuperDrive model, plus $50 for a modem, plus ~150 for RAM)

That said, I understand there is much debate over the matched pairs in the new Intel Macs. For those who think RAM is my answer, the question is this: What will be faster: Adding a 1GB chip for a total of 1256 MB non matched or adding a matched pair of 512's, for a total of 1024 MB?

The Page outs should not be anywhere near equal to the Page ins. A page out occurs during a lack of real (RAM) memory and the virtual memory subsystem has to write blocks of memory to disk in order to re-use RAM for whatever process requires it. The pages outs would rarely be zero, especially on a busy system, but what you have is much too high.

My system doesn't work particularly well and could use more RAM at times, but you can see that my figures are nowhere near as bad.

 

[QCassidy352]

Page ins/outs: 72056/67131 (Don't know what these are - is that a lot?)
Wired: ~150 MB
Active: ~220 MB
Inactive: ~95 MB
Used: ~462 MB
Free: ~32 MB
VM Size: ~9.2 GB

well gosh, 67,000 page outs. No one saw that coming! TheMac19, you definitely need more RAM. (Still disagree, IJ??)

In answer to your question about a 1 gig stick and 2x 512, you'd probably do better with the 1.25, but not by much. The pairing does help, more on some tasks than others, but overall, the extra 256 would probably mean more.

 

[IJ Reilly]

well gosh, 67,000 page outs. No one saw that coming! TheMac19, you definitely need more RAM. (Still disagree, IJ??)

Hmm, I'd still like to know what he's doing to produce so many page-outs. I can push my Macs quite hard and get zero page-outs with tens of thousands of page-ins.

 

[zap2]

Well my new Mac Mini Core Duo is faster then my iMac G5, after i added 1Gb of RAM(to get up to 1,25Gb)

Atleast try more RAM, if you have the cash, it can't hurt

 

[gloss]

Hmm, I'd still like to know what he's doing to produce so many page-outs. I can push my Macs quite hard and get zero page-outs with tens of thousands of page-ins.

Still think it's not the RAM?

 

[aristobrat]

Hmm, I'd still like to know what he's doing to produce so many page-outs. I can push my Macs quite hard and get zero page-outs with tens of thousands of page-ins.

By "push hard", do you mean "open more programs than your Macs have physical memory for"?

 

[IJ Reilly]

By "push hard", do you mean "open more programs than your Macs have physical memory for"?

No, I mean well beyond the "basic stuff" as the OP reported: widgets, Safari, Mail. I can run far far more than that on one gig and get no page-outs. I just opened two, 25 mb files in Preview, which is far larger than what most people will do, while Safari, Mail, iCal, Pages, Address Book and Activity Monitor were all also running. I got 455 page-outs, no beach balls, on a much slower system. Closed the files, no more page-outs. So yes, I'd still like to know how someone could get that many page-outs running just Safari and Mail.

 

[gekko513]

I'm now on my Mac mini G4 with 512MB RAM and I know that it is easy to make it grind to a near stand still using just Safari, Mail, Widgets and iTunes.

I open 10 of some of the most used news sites in my bookmarks bar in 10 different tabs.
http://www.dagbladet.no/
http://www.vg.no/
http://www.dagsavisen.no/
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.aftenposten.no/
http://www.dn.no/
http://digi.no/
http://www.itavisen.no/
http://www.hardware.no/

Then I open Dashboard with 10 Widgets.
Then I open Mail.
Then I open iTunes... with all the other stuff open, iTunes takes over 20 seconds to open up. Changing between tabs in Safari is beachballs gallore. Trying to activate Dashboard and do a search in dictionary lags for almost 20 seconds.

Page ins and outs during this session is 60000/50000. Even switching to Activity Monitor and back takes around 30 seconds with beachballing.

For me it's not really a problem because I know the two major reasons why this happens. Web-sites filled with Macromedia Flash contents and lots of Widgets. If I limit myself to one web-site at a time with lots of Flash content and just the most necessary widgets, I'll be just fine.

I also know that this is mostly RAM related, because my old PowerBook G4 1GHz with 768MB had a noticably higher threshold for going into this kind of RAM starvation behaviour. Even if the processor on that was slower.

 

[bousozoku]

Also, I just realised that although I'd thought I wasn't running anything under rosetta (except when my parents use AOL, ugh - why isn't that Universal yet?!?!)

Alas, there are several PowerPC apps running constantly, which perhaps might not be helping matters any. It appears that all 4 items all related to the new HP 1510 that we got with the Mini are all constantly running as "PowerPC" - as shown below.

696 HP IO Classic Proxy tommy 0.00 2 4.20 MB 390.82 MB PowerPC
695 HP IO Classic Proxy 2 tommy 0.00 2 4.19 MB 394.02 MB PowerPC
693 HP Event Handler tommy 0.00 4 3.24 MB 408.21 MB PowerPC
692 Print Daemon tommy 0.00 2 252.00 KB 97.61 MB PowerPC

I thought the HP drivers were up to date with being Universal, but apparently not. I just ran the HP update software, but it says I'm up to date...

I'm not all that knowledgeable on HP printers for Mac these days but anything that says that it's working for Classic definitely doesn't belong since there is no Classic support on Intel machines. You might be able to disable those two processes and save yourself some RAM but it might cause you some headaches.

If it were me, I'd check for whatever is causing those Classic processes and try to move them to keep them from being activated. I wouldn't delete them until I had determined it was completely safe, i.e. the printer was printing properly and there were no kernel panics, etc.

 

[aristobrat]

So yes, I'd still like to know how someone could get that many page-outs running just Safari and Mail.

I think he also mentioned AOL (via Rosetta), iTunes, and some HP printer drivers.

Either way, he's out of memory, which means he can either change how his parents use their machine, they can add more memory to the machine, or trade the machine in for one with a faster hard drive where paging isn't as noticeable.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I'm now on my Mac mini G4 with 512MB RAM and I know that it is easy to make it grind to a near stand still using just Safari, Mail, Widgets and iTunes.

Yes, and I was able to produce page-outs by loading two huge tiff images in Preview, plus running a number of other applications. I'm not saying this isn't possible. Of course it is -- even on a system with maxed-out RAM -- especially if you make a special effort, which both you and I did. Under more normal loads? Probably not, and easy enough to cure when it does happen.

I recognize that I'm making a major PITA argument as far as many people are concerned, but I think it should be clear, I am not making a "you never need more than stock RAM argument." What I am not totally buying is the "you always need more than stock RAM" argument. I don't think either one is necessarily true.

 

[decksnap]

While I do understand that for many reasons this might be a case for more RAM- I do see where IJ is coming from. If you don't have twenty widgets on your dashboard, or don't have twenty web pages open, 512 MB of RAM is plenty for a lot of people on OS X. Now I don't know how badly the graphics rob the RAM, but on PPC, 512 was plenty of RAM for plenty of people.

There seems to be a lot of RAM happy people on this board- 'get two or three Gigs, one ain't enough!' Come on. I run a Gb of RAM in a G5 tower that's typically running a base set of suitcase, itunes, mail, safari, Illustrator, and Quark, and usually a lot more get piled on. No problems whatsoever. Basic users of mail, safari, itunes, etc should not have any problems with that amount.

 

[gekko513]

Why did 10 widgets and 10 web pages turn into 20 widgets and 20 web pages?

And I don't really see that 10 widgets and 10 web pages is much of a special effort. I frequently end up with more than 10 web pages open at the same time through normal browsing if I don't pay attention.

 

[aristobrat]

If you don't have twenty widgets on your dashboard, or don't have twenty web pages open, 512 MB of RAM is plenty for a lot of people on OS X.

It's just that the symptoms reported by the OP were classic of a mini that was spending too much time swapping out...

 

[decksnap]

Why did 10 widgets and 10 web pages turn into 20 widgets and 20 web pages?

20... a million. Whatever. Wasn't addressing your post. I stand by what I said- 1, 512 is fine for a LOT of user's needs, and 2, there's a lot over overprescription of RAM on these boards.

 

[IJ Reilly]

20... a million. Whatever. Wasn't addressing your post. I stand by what I said- 1, 512 is fine for a LOT of user's needs, and 2, there's a lot over overprescription of RAM on these boards.

Amen to that.

FWIW, I also opened a 20+mb file in Photoshop 5.0 running in Classic, along with the usual selection of OSX applications, copied a portion of of the graphic, pasted it into a new file. No page-outs.

 

[bousozoku]

20... a million. Whatever. Wasn't addressing your post. I stand by what I said- 1, 512 is fine for a LOT of user's needs, and 2, there's a lot over overprescription of RAM on these boards.

512 MB will serve most users' needs with a bare installation. Start using iLife and/or iWork or Photoshop or 3D games and 1 GB is nice but 512 MB is insufficient for the impatient, especially for machines with slow hard drives.

My general usage would be much better with 1.25 - 1.5 GB since I've been in a recurrent situation with only a few megabytes free with 1.5 GB total. 768 MB is usable, though, but I'm often having to stop applications to get any sort of reasonable performance.

Maybe extra RAM isn't a panacea, but used wisely, it'll certain make life more pleasant.

 

[The Mad Kiwi]

It's also possible that one of the processes has a memory leak, keep an eye out for any processes chewing through the memory.

 

[bousozoku]

It's also possible that one of the processes has a memory leak, keep an eye out for any processes chewing through the memory.

Something like an operating system in its first widespread test?

 

[Counterfit]

Keep in mind that the video card takes a MINIMUM of 80MB of RAM, leaving the user with 432MB max to use.