new mac user , need some ( a lot ) of help

[MagicBoy]

I did read the article .... when it came out. I don't need re-educating, I'm perfectly happy with my qualifications. Real world and artificial tests are two very different things. This has gone massively off topic, so I'm stopping here.

 

[VICTORBR35]

No idea without actually getting my hands on the mac to do some hands on troubleshooting if I'm honest. You've not given us any details on what type and bitrate of files you are having issues with. One thing I will say is that VLC only supports MPEG4 AVC hardware assisted decode on the Mac.

Media Centre software like Kodi and Plex have better support for hardware decode.

I am trying to run mkv and mp4 files 3-4 gb average x264 files. note that the issue happens not just with vlc but quicktime as well

 

[VICTORBR35]

gonna try that player now , i will post results in 2 miunutes

These numbers look pretty good; the CPU is not being taxed too heavily here.



And yeah, this shows that you're near the limit on RAM. Which, I guess, you've noticed already. Were you able to tell how much RAM VLC was using?



Yeah, the high compression values means that the OS has decided that there's not enough room left, so it's trying to use compression to cram more data into less memory. This trick works to some extent, but increases the load on the CPU, and may contribute to slowdowns on retrieving video (depending on how the compression is being performed).

(And yes, Chrome can be a real memory hog. It's still my own favorite browser, though. )



Apple has always rated user experience first, efficiency second; but still, I don't think it's right to blame the OS just yet. El Capitan is definitely being used by many folks without problems.

I think the first thing I would suggest is to try using a video player other than VLC (_anything_ other than VLC ) VLC is probably the most powerful and flexible video player available, but it gains that power at the cost of speed and efficiency. I personally think MPlayerX (available at mplayerx.org ) is a good option.



That's the native refresh rate for most LCD monitors these days; I don't think it should make a difference here.



You can dig into the list of processes in the Memory tab of the Activity Monitor to find out which processes are consuming the most RAM. It may indeed be the case that the OS is using most of it, but you might just find that there is some odd utility or set of utilities running that are quietly eating up your RAM. In any case, I believe that a Mac with 4 Gig of RAM running El Capitan and playing a video should, in my opinion, not be running out of memory in this manner...

 

[VICTORBR35]

ok , no good . performance is even worse . actually 10 times worse . if i jump to a scene using the scroll bar it takes around 5 seconds to change and gives me pixels everywhere , the choppiness overral is also much worse than vlc and quicktime .

i am starting to think that this guy never formated this hdd and just did a quick install of the el captan over the previous system that this machine was running ( not sure which one it was ) . althought the hd was clean with just the OS and nothing else .......i dont know .....i am gonna try to actually format this and install el captan from SCRATCH ......if that doesnt solve the problem ...then I don't know what else could I do

 

[jpietrzak8]

ok , no good . performance is even worse . actually 10 times worse . if i jump to a scene using the scroll bar it takes around 5 seconds to change and gives me pixels everywhere , the choppiness overral is also much worse than vlc and quicktime .

Can I ask, what did Activity Monitor show while this was going on? If we can pinpoint the exact culprit eating up either the CPU or the RAM, that'd go a long way towards figuring out a solution...

 

[VICTORBR35]

Can I ask, what did Activity Monitor show while this was going on? If we can pinpoint the exact culprit eating up either the CPU or the RAM, that'd go a long way towards figuring out a solution...

i will check right now . be right back

 

[jpietrzak8]

BTW, I did just try out the latest version of VLC with a 1080p video, and yeah, it works much better than it used to; video runs smooth without interrupting the CPU or using much RAM.

 

[VICTORBR35]

ok things are much worse with this player like i said :

new numbers using mpplayerx

used mem - 3.3 gb
cached archives - 730 mb
swap used - 19 mb ( last time was just 512 k , this is like almost 40 times higher )
app mem - 1.75 gb
resident mem - 930 mb
compressed - 620 mb

all number are much higher when comparing to vlc but cpu usage remains about the same .

Cant understand why running a simple 1080 movie can tax my mem that much , even with all other apps closed . it taxes so much that makes the video extremely choppy .

wghat about formatting HD and install from scratch ? like i said , not sure if the old owner did that for me althought i asked ..he might just went the easier way , installing new OS on top of the last one

 

[jpietrzak8]

ok things are much worse with this player like i said

Yeah, that sounds like this time, mplayerx is the one not using hardware acceleration. VLC is better, then.

used mem - 3.3 gb
cached archives - 730 mb
swap used - 19 mb ( last time was just 512 k , this is like almost 40 times higher )
app mem - 1.75 gb
resident mem - 930 mb
compressed - 620 mb

Actually, 19mb still isn't a whole lot of swap, but it does indicate that the machine is out of breath and gasping for RAM. (And yeah, 620 mb compressed is pretty high for 4gb of physical ram.) Honestly, the app mem should be less than 1.75 gb if all that is running is a video player... Something is using a lot of memory here, and it isn't the OS.

Ok, looking back, even when running VLC, you had app mem at over a GB.

Alright, I'm right now running a 1080p video in VLC, and it's using a grand total of 196.9 MB. If no other apps are open, there just shouldn't be that much app memory being consumed...

There's gotta be something else running using up all that RAM...

 

[dogslobber]

This means that at some point, your machine was under serious pressure for RAM. Once the memory has been compressed (which consumes lots of CPU cycles), it _stays_ compressed (even after the memory pressure has been reduced) until you need to access it, because decompressing the memory takes lots _more_ CPU cycles.

Once again, I would ask that you please, please, please read that article. It's a great article, and you did post the link to it yourself. In summary: swapping is bad, and needs to be avoided at all costs. But compression is not in and of itself at all good; it's simply less bad than swapping.

Memory compression is a simply brilliant addition to OS X. It speeds up the computer dramatically when page faults would otherwise occur as those memory pages were purged. Now they're compressed. In that context, compression cup cycles are negligible. Also, hardware compression will further reduce cpu cycles so don't view compression as bad. Swapping isn't bad either as without it you wouldn't be able to run very many things in parallel.

 

[VICTORBR35]

I am running vlc with 2-2.5 GB free memory ( after I close all apps and run vlc that is how much memory I have, while running vlc) , that is what says the system monitor anyway . The chopiness is reduced now.... But I can still see them during the movie in some scenes.... I wonder if this could be a memory issue even with basically half of my memory free?

 

[Meister]

Very confusing thread so far.
Memory has absolutely nothing to do with video playback. OP is more than fine with 4gb.

I ran the same mini up until recently with the base specs and had no problems with Lightroom, Photoshop, iMovie and of course netflix, itunes and media consumption in general.
Recently upgraded to 10gb ram and now use it as my main desktop. Works like a charm.

Troubleshooting advice in order:

• repair disk permissions
• reset pram
• reset smc
• reinstall OS
• bring in to apple for a hardware check
• upgrade to ssd
• upgrade ram (for price and convenience sake this might be preferable to the ssd upgrade)

 

[jpietrzak8]

I am running vlc with 2-2.5 GB free memory ( after I close all apps and run vlc that is how much memory I have, while running vlc) , that is what says the system monitor anyway . The chopiness is reduced now.... But I can still see them during the movie in some scenes.... I wonder if this could be a memory issue even with basically half of my memory free?

Ok, once you've got free memory available, there will be no more effects from swapping or compression. At this point, I think it becomes a question of whether VLC is able to decode the data quickly enough -- which is often a case of whether the hardware acceleration is being used or not. You might be able to tell by watching the CPU usage in Activity Monitor at the points where choppiness occurs.

Also, does the same choppiness happen with Quicktime?

And, I guess, I should ask how the video is encoded. Some encodings will work better than others with certain players...

EDIT: BTW, when you say you have 2-2.5 GB free, this means that the "Memory Used" field in Activity Monitor displays a value that is 2-2.5 GB less than the "Physical Memory" value, right?

 

[jpietrzak8]

Memory compression is a simply brilliant addition to OS X.

Absolutely agreed!

Also, hardware compression will further reduce cpu cycles so don't view compression as bad.

Er, not exactly. Compression always requires time. If you can use special hardware to perform compression without hitting the CPU (and is that really true? I thought it always hit the CPU), that's great, but using it will always delay getting data out of memory and into the CPU. Compression is bad; it's just that compression is much, much better than swapping!

Swapping isn't bad either as without it you wouldn't be able to run very many things in parallel.

Ah, I'm not a big fan of this view either. Apps require way, way too much RAM these days; I really don't understand why a browser or an e-mail client should need to consume over a gigabyte of RAM in order to run. It is nice to be able to utilize swap if you absolutely, positively have to run more apps than you have the room for; but if modern apps were as efficient in their memory use as they were a decade ago, you'd be able to run dozens and dozens of apps in 4 GB without ever needing to swap...

 

[jpietrzak8]

Very confusing thread so far.
Memory has absolutely nothing to do with video playback. OP is more than fine with 4gb.

The OP was originally running with all physical memory in use, memory compression being performed, even small amounts of swapping starting. When there is no free RAM available, video playback absolutely will suffer.

 

[Meister]

The OP was originally running with all physical memory in use, memory compression being performed, even small amounts of swapping starting. When there is no free RAM available, video playback absolutely will suffer.

That's nonsense.
I sometimes had 2gb swap files and over 7gb (of only 4gb) in use and playback never stuttered at all.

The OPs problems have absolutely nothing to do with RAM.

 

[jpietrzak8]

That's nonsense.
I sometimes had 2gb swap files and over 7gb (of only 4gb) in use and playback never stuttered at all.

Ok, when you are talking about video playback, are you talking about playing video directly from a Blu-ray disk, or from a video file that uses a significant amount of compression? The compression level, and the codec in use, can significantly alter the amount of CPU cycles and memory required to play a video. Also, if the other apps in use are not actually doing anything at the time the video is playing (and, therefore, neither the swapped data nor the compressed data is being accessed), you might get lucky enough that the OS doesn't need to pause the video playback in order to perform any paging or decompression.

Still, I gotta say, you don't want to be running with gigabytes of swap all the time. You'll end up waiting forever for apps to get their work done, and it does no favors for the lifespan of your HD/SSD either...

 

[Meister]

Ok, when you are talking about video playback, are you talking about playing video directly from a Blu-ray disk, or from a video file that uses a significant amount of compression? The compression level, and the codec in use, can significantly alter the amount of CPU cycles and memory required to play a video. Also, if the other apps in use are not actually doing anything at the time the video is playing (and, therefore, neither the swapped data nor the compressed data is being accessed), you might get lucky enough that the OS doesn't need to pause the video playback in order to perform any paging or decompression.

Still, I gotta say, you don't want to be running with gigabytes of swap all the time. You'll end up waiting forever for apps to get their work done, and it does no favors for the lifespan of your HD/SSD either...

Again: the op's problem has nothing to do with ram.