Q: Preview memory sqroo-up
Okay, let's see if this posts without the profanity (although the Apple music forums are full of the f-word...)
An hour or so ago (that's how long it took me to get these forums to work in OS 10.4.11) I opened a 13 MB PDF in Preview, did a search for a particular word.... and everything froze. Couldn't kill Preview, couldn't quit other apps, couldn't even switch to the Finder for a minute. Then i got the pop-up "Your startup drive is almost full".
Indeed the startup drive WAS full--getinfo showed ZERO MEGS AVAILABLE. That's seriously messed up. Can someone tell me what happened? And, who wrote an app (Preview) that would do something like that?? That's beyond sick.
Filling my startup drive (there was almost 1 GB free before that) included writing thousands of files, many of which were stored on a temporary 300 MB RAMdisk. Why..? BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT TO EXPAND THOUSANDS OF LITTLE FILES ONTO A PHYSICAL HARD DRIVE!! RAMdisk memory usage (in Activity Monitor) went from 302 MB to about 4 MB, and free space on my Startup drive went from 900 MB to 0 MB. That's ZERO. Hence Preview itself somehow used 600 MB.
At this point I *might* have answered my own question--Opening a smaller PDF in preview and searching for the letter "e" grabbed about 30 MB (5813 occurrences of "e"). Incredible, but it's conceivable that in a PDF 10 times that size, it could have grabbed 300 MB, or maybe 600..?? If that is the cause, i.e. the pathetic MacOS Preview app in which it starts searching as soon as you start typing, then problem solved. Type faster, or else copy/paste your search term (how sick is it to have to do that?). Because if you're a slow typer, or start typing at the wrong instant, it'll start searching for a single f**kin' letter, e.g. "e" instead of the word "elephant."
But Preview still shouldn't grab 600+ MB, and I'm not convinced that was the cause. Has anyone else had this problem (I would assume)?
PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11), G4; G5; Dual-Core iMac.
Posted on Sep 23, 2016 11:56 PM