Is there any way to disable the memory compression in Mac OS X for a specific application? I read how to disable it in general at Disable compressed memory in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks? , but in my case it seems to produce a problem for one specific program only.
Specifically, data analysis in Stata (Stata 13 MP) comes to a complete standstill when I work with data sets that are sufficiently large (about 6 GB on my system with 8 GB RAM) to trigger the memory compression service.
Now, I understand that the compression service is supposed to get active when the system runs out of memory, and also that the swapping of data from memory to hard-disk (a fast SSD) will be 100ths of times slower than operations done within memory. But the program does not just become slow, it comes to a complete standstill, to the point that I need to force quit it--even when the analysis that needs to be done is trivial (using only seconds in slightly smaller data sets).
When the problem occurs, Activity Monitor shows that a kernel_task that seems to be the compression service starts to use 4 or 5 GB of memory and a lot of CPU time. The process itself seems to use so much memory that other applications are squeezed out of memory. On Windows computers with equal memory the data analysis of the same file runs smooth, even though that computer is substantially slower when using files that are slightly smaller.
The whole idea of data compression does not seem to make not much sense to be applied to data analysis programs in which the user chooses at runtime which data is loaded into memory. If I choose to load a big data set into memory to analyse it right now the OS should not try to outsmart me by compressing it in the background. Any ideas? I am wondering that no-one else had this problem before ...
Thanks! A Stata user.
