Do you find Tiger to be memory hungry?

On my Mac Mini 512MB it's ridiculous. Panther was very fast, and Tiger is very slow. mds, part of Spotlight, often wants to use 64MB of memory to itself (a killall -HUP fixes that for a while).. and, well I'm always hitting up against my 512 (yeah, even with active + wired) whereas I was hovering aroung 400 in Panther. I decided I'm going to buy a 1GB stick. Shame, the 512 is only 3 months old! :)

I'd agree anecdotally that it seems like Tiger is eating more of my memory than Panther did. There are definitely cases when I'm suddenly swapping HARD (768MB real RAM). I've been trying to narrow down the cause to file a bug report, but it's tough to nail down. Most recently, I managed to see Safari trying to switch into RAM and using >700MB of VM. Thus everything ground to a halt as I was swapping. I'm continuing to investigate. But a pile of anecdotes certainly look suspicious. You might not get a conviction (or a firm bug report) but it's not totally bogus IMHO. -Geoff

Urp, forgot to mention that find does it's thing in the first 5-10 seconds. Ctrl-C to kill it so you don't thrash your disk... -SM-

In Terminal under Panther, $ find / -name "*cache" -ls seems to release unused memory. Doing so as superuser seems to work even better. (Don't have Tiger so I can't say whether this trick works in 10-4.)

OSX kernel won't swap out freed memory until someone really asked for it. For example,you have 512 MB machine. And you have one program running and the activity monitor says it takes about 475 meg of ram that doesn't mean that all of them are in used; some of them has been freed. If you open the second application and this application asked the kernel for 200 meg of ram, it'll then start swaping out freed memory from 475 Meg of first application. This lazy type of memory management is actually a very smart way of doing business; eliminating unnecessary job. Don't worry, even guys at some mac magazines don't know this and write an ariticle about how to identify bad mac program by looking at memory it takes in activity monitor -_-"

iBook G4 1.33GHz with 1.25Gb of RAM... The only trouble I've had, memory-wise, since my Archive & Install of Tiger is with iTunes. Not that much thrashing, but devouring my memory. Word '04 thrashed around a bit on me today, but I expect the occasional thrash from Word. With one bizarre exception, the circumstances of which were so strange that I've completely forgotten them, Tiger's run beautifully on my machine.

Too many people have anectdotal stories, but no real benchmarks. I did a simple upgrade of my Mac Mini (1GB of RAM installed) and I have had very few problems with memory running low. I do notice that Safari continues to use more and more memory over time. It appears that opening and closing new tabs OR windows does not reduce memory. The only way to get Safari to release it's memory is by quitting and restarting it. So there may be a problem with that, but nothing else about Tiger seems to be a problem that I can see. Of course, Dashboard widgets are new, and the more you have open, the more memory is being used. Many people forget that out of sight does not mean out of memory for Widgets.

I have a 667MHz TiBook DVI with 1GB RAM with an Archive and Install Tiger upgrade. I've definitely noticed more thrashing in Tiger than Panther and something is definitely using more memory, but I can't work out what it is. I'm starting to think that something has a memory leak because I don't conistently suffer from this and a reboot seems to fix things for a while. Partially related seems to be an issue where widgets grab a lot of memory and use up to 60% of the CPU every now and then (and that simply can't be a requirement for their occasional updates!)

On my iBook G4 1.25ghz model (768MB RAM) purchased in February, i'm not having any problems at all with Tiger. For the first time ever, I did the "upgrade" route instead of a clean install. Not a problem. On our eMac 800mhz model, it obviously doesn't run as fast as the 'book but it's still okay. Only problems we've noticed are 'net related with some major slowdowns (while the iBook running thru the Airport off the same connection would just blaze along w/out problems). Had to shut down the eMac, the router, the Vonage and the Airport completely a couple times over the last week to alleviate the problem but generally speaking it's worked great! Love it.

@Erik J: Don't assume that free memory is a good thing. In essence free memorhy is "bad". You want to use as MUCH of your memory as you can as it will accelerate the the overall performance of the computer. What makes or breaks this is how intelligent and good the memory handling in the OS is. Under ideal circumstances NONE of the memory has to be written to disk. Under real life circumstances you almost ALWAYS need to put some stuff on disk, and this is where the memory manager in the OS comes in and can really show how good it is. Windows, in general, does a lousy job with memory managment. Panther was lightyears ahead of it and even now in Tiger I don't really see anything I can complain about. I guess I may sing a different tune tonight when I start up my new Powermac that arrived today and for the next week or so will only have 512MB RAM before the ordered RAM arrives.