“A new feature of Mac OS 10.9 – Mavericks – compressed memory, increases the effective size of DRAM through inline data compression,” Robin Harris reports for ZDNet. “This isn’t a new idea: over 20 years ago the HP Omnibook 300 used inline compression to double the effective size of its 10MB compact flash card.”
“What is new is that with multiple cores running an optimized compression algorithm the system can compress/decompress data much faster than swapping to disk or SSD. This saves time and energy, since the system isn’t idling waiting for memory page swaps – important for notebooks,” Harris reports. “And there’s nothing to configure: it works automatically in the background. All you see is a more stable Mac with more memory.”
“With Mavericks memory compression I’m seeing much improved behavior from my MacBook Air: tiny swap file sizes; greater stability; and no performance hit. Even with Safari open for almost 4 days and dozens of open tabs, Final Cut Pro, Preview, Mail, VLC, an FTP client, text editor and the usual dozens of background tasks the swap file is a tiny 114MB where normally it would be at least 2500MB – hurting performance – and growing fast,” Harris reports. “If you were skeptical about the value of a free OS update, fret no more: this single feature makes a lightweight notebook much more viable for power users.”
Read more in the full article here.
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