Q: Preview App memory leak

The same problem. Apple, fix it please. I didn't have this issue on Yosemite. Apple support says that I should wait new versions of El Capitan. System diagnostic don't show any problems on mac.
rMBP 13 early 2015

OS X El Capitan 10.11.1

budy, did you try the new 10.11.2, is there still memory leak in Preview?

Thanks!

I am on 10.11.2 and still have the same problem.. *** Apple!

Thanks man to let us know...

That is a really BAD news, Apple suck or should I say "IN" programmers suck!

OSX el Capitan 10.11.2

I was curious to see how much memory I was using just cause I had a few things open that I thought might be heavy memory users. I was using 13-something out of 16GB.

Man was I ever surprised when I realized Preview was using over 10GB, ***, - Really!

But then again I had a feeling something wasn't right with preview, I do tend to use it allot for class and I've had it freak out a few times. I could talk about it for awhile...

My guess is the preview source code isn't something one can just have a look at now is it?

The same happens to my Early 2015 Macbook Pro retina 13", with OS X 10.11.3. The leak appears with both Preview and Skim (which uses PDFKit as preview). It doesn't appear with the PDF viewer in Safari. I already reported the problem to Apple and encourage everyone to do the same, although I haven't received any reply.

I'm not convinced Preview has a memory leak. You may just be seeing OSX's memory management at work. I opened a 329 page PDF in Preview and once I scrolled through it a couple times Preview was using 4.62GBs. If it had a leak OSX would not be able to release that memory when needed. Unfortunately I have 32GBs of RAM and didn't feel like opening enough applications to check.

With less memory and Preview open, and you can no longer open any programs, that would be evidence of a memory leak.

Well, I have "only" 16 GB and when I wasn't aware of this problem I ended up with applications force quitting because there was no memory left and consequent loss of unsaved work. In my case, closing the open document(s) without quitting Preview does not release the memory.

So this is definitely a memory leak, or poor memory management by OSX. Call it whatever you want, it is something that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Also, this is a regression because the problem was not there in Yosemite. I can reproduce the problem and shared debug info with Apple, but they don't reply.

FWIW, Apple doesn't normally respond directly. At least in my experience. And I didn't say there was no leak. I just said I wasn't convinced.

And indeed I replied to convince you.

I'm getting there.

I have been opening big pdf files in Preview and Skim. Memory usage does increase a lot the more I scroll up and down. But when I close documents memory usage decreases immediately. I am on 10.11.3 as well (2014 rMBP).

I'm trying right now and when the document is closed only a small part of the memory is released, about 10-20%. So if one opens and closes many documents Preview will use a lot of memory.

FWIW, only the amount of memory needed will be released. If OSX needs more, it will release it. BTW, if there was a memory leak, it wouldn't release any. You more or less disproved your own argument that Preview or PDFKit has a memory leak.

Like I said, and I can reproduce it, the system will eventually run out of memory, causing preview and or other applications to force quit. So it is false that OSX releases memory if it needs it. I don't know if this is technically a memory leak, but for sure it is a problem in memory management and a serious bug for what is supposed to be "the world's most advanced OS". An OS can't run out of memory because of its integrated PDF viewer whether it is a memory leak, a memory hog or whatever you call it.