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My MBP (OS X Mavericks) with 4G RAM has been slow ever since I bought it last year, but now it's getting ridiculous with the loading symbol showing up each time I open a new tab in Chrome or even click a folder in Finder.

From my limited understandning, it seems that the memory and CPU usage stats are normal. I've also tried a safeboot. Here are my stats:

Physical Memory: 4.00 GB        App Memory:   1.82 GB
Memory Used:     3.94 GB        File Cache:   398.4 GB
Virtual Memory:  6.74 GB        Wired Memory: 714.4 GB
Swap Used:       154.0 GB       Compressed:   1.04 GB

And CPU:

System: 5.09%
User:   8.08%

That hard drive is far from full, so what else could the problem be?

EDIT

Here are some screenshots after a fresh reboot with the following programs manually opened: Chrome with 5 tabs, Sublime Text, Terminal with 2 tabs, and Spotify (music streaming app, currently not playing). After reboot, swap memory just went to 0. I don't know what that means. Sorry for the Swedish labels, but I guess you can tell what is what.

CPU and Memory tabs

CPU

Memory

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  • The reason it is slow is because your using 3.94GB out of 4GB so nearly 98.5% of your memory. You tell us what is using so much of your system memory? have you considering updating to Yosemite
    – Ramhound
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 12:09
  • I'd update to at least 8GB RAM long before updating to Yosemite, or it will get worse. Swap 154GB! & Wired memory 714GB! Ouch! Something is really not right there. Look again at Activity Monitor & see what is using all that. After 4 days uptime [this machine only reboots for low-level updates, but I had one this week] I'm seeing 9MB [yes, MB] swap used, & wired at 1.73 GB
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 13:58
  • Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to add more RAM. I'm having a hard time understanding what is consuming all that memory from the Activity Control but I posted some screenshots. Looks pretty normal (albeit after reboot), right?
    – user397641
    Commented Dec 10, 2014 at 21:28
  • @trevorDashDash - Out of curiosity, what was using nearly all your RAM and 150+ GB of swap file? And I'd hardly call that "normal" memory usage :)
    – jww
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 9:15

1 Answer 1

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As indicated by @Ramhound your RAM is saturated and it is using massive amounts of SWAP space. Besides the fact that as pointed out Mac OSX has become more and more RAM hungry with each new relase and upgrading to 8GB would help you a lot with speed, considering you said it was like this shortly after a reboot I would say you have some installed program that has gone into the weeds for it to be using over 150GB swap space. The best thing you can do is a clean re-install of the latest OSX version supported for your machine and DO NOT copy the installed programs over from your old version as you might only be re-installing the same issue you have.

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  • Yeah, copy over applications one-by-one until you isolate the offender, though I suspect the reinstall will cleanup whatever "went into the weeds"
    – Alexander
    Commented Jul 8, 2019 at 21:05

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