KD8SHH
Level 1
(1 points)
Q: How to fix huge iTunes memory leak in 64-bit Windows 7?
iTunes likes to allocate as much as 1.6GB of memory on my dual-quad XEON 8GB 64-Bit Windows computer and then becomes unresponsive.
This can happen several times a day and has been going on for as long as I can remember. No other software that I use does this - only Apple's iTunes. Each version I have installed of iTunes appears to have this same memory leak. Currently I am running version 10.7.0.21.
I love iTunes when it works. But having to constantly kill and relaunch the app throughout the day is bringing me down.
Searching for a fix for this on the internet just surfaces more and more complaints about this problem - but without a solution.
Having written shrinkwrapped software for end users as well as for large corporations and governments for more than 25 years I know a thing or two about software. A leak like this should take no more than a day or two to locate using modern software tools and double that to fix it. So why with each new version of iTunes does this problem persist? iTunes for Windows is the flagship software product Apple makes for non-Mac users - yet they continue to pass up each opportunity they have had over the years with each new release to fix this issue. Why is this?
Either the software engineers are not that good or they have been told NOT to spend time on this issue. I personally believe that the engineers at Apple are very good, and therefore am left thinking that the latter is more likely the case. Maybe this is to coax people to purchase a Mac so that they can finally run iTunes without these egregious memory leaks. I would like to offer another issue to consider.
Just as Amazon sold Kindles and Google sold Nexus tablets at low cost - not counting on margin for profit - but instead they wanted to saturate the marketplace with tools for making future purchases of content almost trivial to do with their devices. Apple also counts on this model with their pricer hardware - but they also have iTunes. Instead of trying to get people to switch to a MAC by continuing to avoid fixing this glaring issue in iTunes for Windows I would like to suggest that by allowing their engineers to address this issue that Apple will help keep Windows users from jumping ship to another music app. The profit to be made by keeping those Windows users happy and wedded to the iTunes store is obvious.
By continuing to keep this leak in iTunes for Windows all it does is lower my esteem for the company and start to make me wonder if the software is just as buggy on Macs.
iTunes, Windows 7, 64-Bit 8GB Ram dual quad core Xeon
Posted on Nov 29, 2012 7:00 AM
