It's possible that I got some stuff that affects performance.
It's almost certain that migrating something from your old mac caused this. Clean installs of OS X do not have the problems you describe, even on the 13" rMBP's weak GPU.
Disabling dynamic_pager disables swap, and that's not a good idea on OS X. Any perceived difference in performance is likely placebo. Have you tried a blind test? Have a friend disable/enable swap and see if you can guess correctly. You might be surprised at the results.
Instead of risking the instability and performance degradation that is likely to occur when changing low-level OS settings, you should figure out what you migrated that's causing the issue. Do some science. If you create another account and log in, do the issues persist? What if you boot off the restore partition? Are there any specific errors in the system console? If you backup, erase, and install a clean OS X, do the issues persist? What if you copy your dotfiles over to this clean install? What if you copy your old ~/Library to it? Etcetera. Once you reproduce the problem, you can use time machine to restore to an unaffected version.
You might as well upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, hack a bunch of registry entries to change kernel behavior, and then complain that Windows is buggy and slow. Blaming the operating system is easy, but it won't fix your problem. The cause is something you copied from your previous set-up. Find it and you'll be a much happier camper.
> but I'm guessing it's similar to this blog post from a while back
That's the link. He didn't change his mind, he merely upgraded and got better performance. That did not happen in my case.
> Have you tried a blind test?
No need. Before the change, my mouse pointer was freezing up every few seconds, and I got "IOHIDSystem cursor update overdue. Resending." in the system log very frequently. This disappeared completely after disabling the pager.
The difference in performance is stunning. For example, previously, opening a new tab in Chrome would not animate the tab line correctly, resulting in a weird "jolt" as the tab came into place. Now it's smooth.
> Do some science.
The problem is that these things take a lot of time. Time that I don't have. At some point I might create a new user and see if that helps.
>No need. Before the change, my mouse pointer was freezing up every few seconds, and I got "IOHIDSystem cursor update overdue. Resending." in the system log very frequently. This disappeared completely after disabling the pager.
The difference in performance is stunning. For example, previously, opening a new tab in Chrome would not animate the tab line correctly, resulting in a weird "jolt" as the tab came into place. Now it's smooth.
Both sound like problems TOTALLY unrelated to the dynamic paging, that accidentally were solved by disabling it. Especially seeing that people with the paging enabled don't see any slowdowns such as these AT ALL.
My guess is some BS software left over from the previous installation, a SIBML plugin, a haxie, or something else faulty, that caused the unnecessary paging. If you have found and removed that, then you wouldn't have had other issues with the paging functionality.
For what it's worth, I tried re-enabling the pager, and a few hours later the IOHIDSystem cursor update overdue error started coming back around twice a minute, keyboard input speed started suffering from micro-freezes, and apps such as Chrome started lagging again.
Parent is correct, and it's not placebo. Disabling swap on OS X usually results in a dramatic improvement. People unfamiliar with the poor memory management of OS X tend to become personally offended by this suggestion and often start explaining how swap works (usually incorrectly). The reason is simple; it swaps when it doesn't need to, and swapping is much slower than accessing memory. For what it's worth, I've been running this way for years.
Yes, I know how swap works - I'm a kernel developer (mainly FreeBSD, but I have experience with most mainstream desktop kernels, including Windows). No, it's not dangerous to run without it in 2013 if you have enough memory.
It's almost certain that migrating something from your old mac caused this. Clean installs of OS X do not have the problems you describe, even on the 13" rMBP's weak GPU.
First, disabling the dynamic pager [1].
I don't know what you tried to link to, but I'm guessing it's similar to this blog post from a while back: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de... . The author changed his mind after 10.8 came out: http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/28556080639/mountain-lion-s...
Disabling dynamic_pager disables swap, and that's not a good idea on OS X. Any perceived difference in performance is likely placebo. Have you tried a blind test? Have a friend disable/enable swap and see if you can guess correctly. You might be surprised at the results.
Instead of risking the instability and performance degradation that is likely to occur when changing low-level OS settings, you should figure out what you migrated that's causing the issue. Do some science. If you create another account and log in, do the issues persist? What if you boot off the restore partition? Are there any specific errors in the system console? If you backup, erase, and install a clean OS X, do the issues persist? What if you copy your dotfiles over to this clean install? What if you copy your old ~/Library to it? Etcetera. Once you reproduce the problem, you can use time machine to restore to an unaffected version.
You might as well upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7, hack a bunch of registry entries to change kernel behavior, and then complain that Windows is buggy and slow. Blaming the operating system is easy, but it won't fix your problem. The cause is something you copied from your previous set-up. Find it and you'll be a much happier camper.