Snow Leopard Memory Hog

Inactive RAM grows to the point where it is the largest segment, free RAM goes to almost nothing,

And again. It's inactive and the OS will immediately flush it in favor of a newly launched active program. You don't need to pay one bit of attention to it.

Wow. This is almost comical.

A large digital audio session is going on, with virtual instruments, lots of audio tracks, etc. You've been working and working, and all of a sudden the computer starts crawling. You look at your memory usage and, lo and behold, the inactive RAM segment is HUGE and you've got 100MB of free RAM left. But not to fear, simply launching another app will free it up, right? WRONG. It just slows down till you have no choice but quit what your doing and reboot everything.

I know you're having a hard time accepting that. This must be a scenario you've never encountered or thought of. But it HAPPENS. Read the post earlier about the Xserve having to be rebooted becuase the inactive RAM just will not get cleared. Come on, bro, pull your head out of the sand for one second and maybe consider that pros really encounter issues when we push our machines. Your understanding of the dynamics of the OS are purely theoritcal and what it's supposed to do on paper. Our understanding is from trying to keep our machines running under our normal use. If you just sit there and keep spouting that it's not supposed to happen you are of no use to anyone who actually experiences the issue.

And I have attitude? And you think 100MB of RAM is a lot of space? Did it occur to you that maybe the reason the OS isn't using that segment is because the code you're trying to use is too large to fit in that space, so it would just page out anyway? If you're clogging your RAM that tightly all the time, you need to install more RAM.

Never mind andy144. You clearly have one idea on this. Yours.

I think you are simply refusing to understand the problem.

In pro worlds, time is critical. If we had to reboot and reload every time this issue crippled our systems, that would add up to very large amounts of time. When clients are sitting there staring at you, it's not good for your reputation.

The fact that you completely misquoted the number in my scenario tells me you don't really understand. No, I don't think 100MB is a lot of space. It's often time the amount of free RAM that's left after the Inactive segment has grown so large and REFUSES to be cleared out. That's why our systems slow to a crawl. They are doing so much paging between VM and that tiny little space of free RAM that's left that the computer is completely bogged. At THAT POINT is when we have to reboot our entire sessions, or most of the time the whole machine.

Repairing Disk Permissions is one way it gets cleared. Rebooting is another way. Both are slow. The "purge" command works beautifully... you don't have to shut anything down. The Inactive RAM is released back into Free RAM and all is right with the world. I wish there were another way to allow users to use the "purge" command without installing the Developer's ToolKit.

If this still doesn't make sense to you, then we operate in two different worlds, and I wish you well. For those of you who have the issue, that's the way to deal with it.

In pro worlds, time is critical.

A poor assumption on your part that you think I'm not a pro user.

I use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Encore, After Effects, oXYgen Scan for Eversmart Supreme scanners, ColorBurst RIP, InDesign, and many other memory intensive apps all day, every day. I launch them when needed, and close them when done. I routinely have 10-15 images open in PS averaging 30 MB in size. Normally, I have at least 5 apps open and running for hours. Never once has my system come to a crawl in years of doing this. Never once have I needed to clear any RAM to get my Mac to "speed up". It runs the same late in the day as it did when I turned it on.

Have you tried reinstalling the OS?

NOW we're getting somewhere.

Re-installing is so time consuming, but I've relied on it many times in the past to clear out gremlins. It's not made a difference in this case.

Like I said before, if you've never encountered this issue, that's great. How much RAM do you have installed? I would also submit that audio/video systems work the computer harder than other fields. I know friends who have plenty of RAM and still hit this wall. Perhaps certain types of extended use bring it up faster than others. Talk to film composers who run huge sessions with giant sets of samples and tracks. They have plenty of RAM, but really use it fully. The "purge" command has been a godsend to guys like that.

I should have said "when clients are looking over your shoulder". My apologies.

I'm willing to accept that you've not encountered this problem. Are you willing to accept it happens to others? Such things are not uncommon, especially in the music production world.

Just so you know I'm not making this up...

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/purge-free-inactive-memory-mac-osx/

Hi, and welcome to Apple Support Communities.

How much RAM do you have, Andy?

Please note the update to the article to which you've linked:

I've also moved to using a MacBook Pro since writing this article which has 8GB of RAM (compared with 4GB on the MacMini) and so I personally no longer have issues with free memory.

Re-installing is so time consuming, but I've relied on it many times in the past to clear out gremlins. It's not made a difference in this case.

Yes, it's no fun, but it's the logical place to start.

I can't imagine you would use them on a production machine, but do you have any haxies installed? If so, get rid of them, no matter how useful your users or yourself think they may be. They all directly interfere with how the OS is supposed to work (as I'm sure you know).

I should have said "when clients are looking over your shoulder". My apologies.

Haha! 🙂 Not laughing at you. It just brings up thoughts of the common complaint, "My car is doing this." But then won't when the mechanic is looking at it.

I'm willing to accept that you've not encountered this problem. Are you willing to accept it happens to others? Such things are not uncommon, especially in the music production world.

Fair enough. But then doesn't that maybe say something about the software being used? Memory leaks in particular, which would cause the OS to be unable to release even inactive RAM, since the data it expects to be in use by the application it was assigned to isn't what's actually there. Or said another way, an errant app has the RAM locked against the OS's protected memory by sitting in segments of RAM it shouldn't even be in. Then yes, I can certainly see where manually flushing that RAM would be necessary.

Just to note, I have 16 GB of RAM in my Mac Pro. I'm considering selling that and installing 24.

andy144 wrote:

I'm willing to accept that you've not encountered this problem. Are you willing to accept it happens to others?

Sure, but the key issue is why it happens to some users but never to others using the same OS, including those that run multiple memory-intensive apps. With that in mind, does it make sense to you to assume the OS is at fault rather than something else?

AFAIK, nobody is saying that "something else" is user idiocy. But the list of possible causes for memory use problems is long. It includes apps, plugins, & third party system add-ons that are incompatible with the OS or out-of-date; coding errors in various applications; several different kinds of file system problems; hardware defects; assorted hacks (some of which can be installed without user knowledge by programs that make no mention of doing that); & a number of user errors that anyone can make, including experts.

Some of these things are easy to find & fix. Some are not, even for highly knowledgeable users with years of experience. For example, reinstalling the OS, even "cleanly" after erasing the drive, won't help if the real culprit is something not eliminated or reinstalled afterwards. Tracking down what that is can be so difficult & time consuming that many users won't even try it, instead using some workaround.

Something else that won't help is assuming that just because the symptoms are similar they must have the same cause or the same cure. It is normal to see the inactive memory allocation increase & free memory allocation decrease in response to application demands, so if that is accompanied by system slowdowns, it does not mean by itself that it must be the cause of those slowdowns. That's like assuming that everyone with fever must have the same disease.

What is decidedly unhelpful is to get angry & insulting when these things are mentioned. That won't get you one inch closer to a solution, whatever it might be, but it will convince a lot of users that it isn't worth their time to volunteer anything even potentially useful. Why should they?

Thanks for the well thought out reply. My original post said I was dismayed by the *dismissive* attitude of those telling people that there was no problem. The majority of posts I've seen that are upsetting are the passive aggressive type, which tell the people that the OS is behaving properly and there is no problem. Yes, there are many factors that could influence the problem. Isn't it interesting, however, that the issue is not coming from just one specific field or type of user?

What is far more discouraging to others volunteering help or information is a dismissive attitude by those with the appearance of more knowledge and experience. Instead of saying "We realize that this causes problems for some and here's a way around it if you can't afford to have the latest machine with the most RAM", users have seen a LOT of "The system is doing what it's supposed to and it's your crappy software or management of your system that's causing it." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I've seen this type of response time and time again from support people and others. There's not a real interest in figuring out a solution for the existing situation, just a desire to feed that superiority complex that seems to pervade the software/tech world.

I doubt seriously that my responses have put off any people who deal with this issue regularly. I also doubt that is puts off anyone with a solution that helps people where they are at. Judging by the discussion so far, it only puts off people who are more concerned with blaming the victim and not the problem.

Again, I will submit that the "purge" command is a great way to deal with this issue. I would rather spend my time suggesting to people that maybe upgrading their systems is ultimately the best goal, but till you can, here's how to keep from going nuts. All that could be said in one paragraph instead of post after post dismissing the entire issue as non-existent.

andy144 wrote:

I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I've seen this type of response time and time again from support people and others. There's not a real interest in figuring out a solution for the existing situation, just a desire to feed that superiority complex that seems to pervade the software/tech world.

That kind of statement is quite insulting to the many users that freely devote many, many hours of their time to trying to help other users in these forums & exactly why so many quit posting to topics like this one.

Please understand that is isn't about blaming anyone. It is about trying to find solutions. That's just about impossible to do when people paraphrase comments or otherwise oversimplify complex subjects, & the subject of the OS X memory management system is no exception. In fact, it is so complex that Activity Monitor's help topic "Viewing system memory usage" is one of the very few help topics in all of the OS that includes a link to an Apple Developer document primarily intended for programmers instead of to other help topics or regular KnowledgeBase articles intended for end users.

It becomes even more impossible to help when users ignore anything that doesn't agree with their preconceived ideas about causes, assume every report of a problem has the same cause (& thus is "the problem" rather than "one of the several problems"), or just neglect to include enough details about their particular systems for anyone to tell what the possible causes of their problems might actually be.

If you check the number of topics devoted to "memory hog" issues both here & elsewhere on the Internet, you will discover this is nothing new. At least as far back as Tiger, users have been complaining that the OS -- including any version you may think handles memory allocation correctly -- doesn't do that. That should tell you something about how unlikely it is that the OS itself is the cause of all these problems. So should the number of users that don't have any of these problems.

That's worth thinking about if you are looking for solutions better than some workaround.

Message was edited by: R C-R

Well then, conversely, you could also say that because the issue happens to so many people that it IS the OS, but only with certain hardware/software combinations. I really hate the ivory tower mentality that because it "doesn't happen to me", that it can't possibly be happening to anyone else. I've had to overcome this mentality with many friends in convincing them to back up their work. "I've never had a problem!" was the mantra, until their time came around and they lost ungodly amounts of work.

Not everyone can afford to have the latest machines or the maximum amount of RAM for them. Not everyone is running "haxies". Not everyone is running some heinous combination of "unworthy" software that no one should be running. Most people are just trying to make what they have available do what they need it to do.

It is *not* necessary to explain the intricacies of OS memory handling. That goes against what the Mac OS is supposed to be about, which is why I find it amusing that so many here feel they need to educate the average user in that. Since this issue obviously occurs, in many systems and not in others, then it very well may be an OS problem, which means there is not an immediate *solution*. However, a workaround is *very* meaningful to those that need to do other things than study the inner workings of their OS.

I have yet to hear any of you from the "it's not the OS" camp acknowledge that the workarounds suggested are viable alternatives to new machines, complete reinstalls, or major upgrades. It's not a perfect world, and most of us are just trying to make the best of the technology. That is not sufficent of justifiable cause for dismissing their problems as "too complex for you to understand."

andy144 wrote:

I really hate the ivory tower mentality that because it "doesn't happen to me", that it can't possibly be happening to anyone else.

The thing is, none of us are saying that. What some of us have been trying to point out is simply that there are several possible causes for system slowdowns & those looking for solutions to that problem would be well advised not to rule any of them out without good reason.

IMO, just guessing that "it very well may be an OS problem" is not a good enough reason to rule out all the other possibilities. It seems to be enough for you, so I guess there is nothing further to discuss.

andy144,

Not to jump in mid-discussion here, but RAM is very, very cheap in most cases and in a professional situation like yours you should have as much installed as you can.

I use a Mac Pro on a regular basis and mine is loaded with 24 GB of RAM and I see no memory issues with it; on a MacBook Pro I use that maxes out at 4 GB of RAM it's much easier to get things to slow down noticeably.

If your machine is already maxed out, that's fine, but you may want to do a little research and find out what your system's maximum RAM complement is and price out just how much it would cost via a third party RAM supplier like Crucial or OWC to upgrade your machine from what you have now to something closer to the limit. For example, many people don't know that that RAM upgrade Apple charges $180 for can be found via third parties for $49, and it will save them many, many (often billable) hours of waiting and frustration.

Note also that there are very definite issues with Snow Leopard and how it handles virtual memory, at least some of which have been fixed in Lion.

The issue is that high usage of inactive memory is bad is completely incorrect; the answer that the system should in fact free up inactive memory when needed is completely true.

However what the system should do and what it sometimes does are, unfortunately, two different things.

Though even if there is an OS problem causing this, it would be obviated by - what else - installing more RAM.

Andy,

Thanks for saving my day (though not saving my life ...as I have to purge every now and then, not to say everyday) . I can guarantee this problem IS REAL and started to happen with me since December, maybe because I've pushing my 4gb memory to its limits, with site management tools such as tweetadder, tweetdeck, etc..

I don't understand why the problem has not been yet handled by apple. it seems to a basic , 101, memory management issue. As you said, it's so big that nobody's sees it 🙂

Anyway, it seems I will have to buy extra memory to palliate the problem, but not solving it. I'm not a power user who needs memory for videos, etc. Just a normal, simple blogger using wordpress.org and Firefox ...

I will purchase extra memory and keep you informed if the problem goes away ... Thank you a lot, I was fed up of rebooting and repairing permissions.