Snow Leopard Memory Hog

Question

Level 1

5 points

Snow Leopard Memory Hog

I have a late 2008 Unibody 13" Macbook 2ghz w/ 2GB of memory. I took a screen shot of the Activity Monitor before installing the update and I had 1.4GB of free memory and now I have only 769MB free. Is it just me or that is what the new OS use in memory. Virtually is sucking up all the memory that I have.

Any suggestions? or is everyone experiencing an significant increase of memory usage?.

Thanks.

MacBook Unibody 5,1, Mac OS X (10.5.6), Snow Leopard Memory Hog usage

Posted on Aug 28, 2009 7:46 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Aug 28, 2009 7:50 PM in response to GFNG

No, I'm not. In many cases I'm seeing the opposite.

What is taking up all this space? Any applications hogging a bunch? Do you have Safari running with 14 tabs each having a bunch of flash videos on them?

Reply

Answer 2

kisuke3

Level 3

914 points

Aug 28, 2009 7:52 PM in response to GFNG

what applications are you running at that time?

Reply

Answer 3

Susan M

Level 2

330 points

Aug 28, 2009 7:57 PM in response to GFNG

Was this right after the Install? If so, Spotlight might have been Indexing, which seems to use a lot of System resources.

Reply

Answer 4

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:11 PM in response to GFNG

Spotlight (MSD) already indexed. Currently the services or apps that take the most are the following:

APP/Serv Real Memory Virtual Memory

Kernel_task 48MB 87MB
WindowsServer 43MB 49MB
Finder 37MB 37MB
Dock 35MB 29MB
DashboardClient 167MB 28MB
MSD 137MB 29MB
Quicklook Helper 57MB 22MB
Logitec Control Center (mouse) 5MB 178MB.

That is what I have.

Reply

Answer 5

Aug 28, 2009 8:14 PM in response to GFNG

What is MSD?

Reply

Answer 6

kisuke3

Level 3

914 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:17 PM in response to William Lloyd

it shouldn't be a resource hog since its using a grand central dispatch plus its a 64 bit kernel. Try booting into safe mode to force it do some maintenance then observer activity monitor from there. If nothing is suspicious then it could be login items or startup items that could be causing this.

Reply

Answer 7

nnickn

Level 1

0 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:34 PM in response to GFNG

Yeah I have the same issue. On leopard I had about 500mb free out of the 1gb I have but now when I turn it on I only have about 300mb free.

Reply

Answer 8

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:37 PM in response to William Lloyd

I read that was spotlight.

Reply

Answer 9

Aug 28, 2009 8:41 PM in response to GFNG

Ah, spotlight is mds (lower case).

Reply

Answer 10

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:43 PM in response to GFNG

I went into safe mode. Forced maintenance and no luck. Kernel is taking 147.9MB of real memory 40MB for windowsserver. between finder, systemuiserver and dock are taking 90MB.

Quick look helper is taking 548.8MB of Virtual memory, logitec control center 178.1MB and MSD 139.8MB of virtual memory.

Reply

Answer 11

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:44 PM in response to William Lloyd

William Lloyd wrote:
Ah, spotlight is mds (lower case).

ohh yeah. My bad. Is mds.

Reply

Answer 12

Aug 28, 2009 8:45 PM in response to GFNG

Virtual memory is not a problem. Real memory is the only thing you need to concern yourself with.

Kernel task takes more RAM in Snow Leopard that Leopard in my experience. But, frankly, if you are not seeing huge numbers of page-outs, I wouldn't really focus much on this.

Reply

Answer 13

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:48 PM in response to GFNG

GFNG wrote:
I have a late 2008 Unibody 13" Macbook 2ghz w/ 2GB of memory. I took a screen shot of the Activity Monitor before installing the update and I had 1.4GB of free memory and now I have only 769MB free.

How much Inactive memory is there? The only meaningful measure is the total of Free and Inactive.

When a running process releases memory, OSX removes it from Active, of course, but marks it Inactive and doesn't clear it, so it's faster to reassign if the same process needs it again. It only goes back to Free when the process that had it ends.

When a process requests new memory, OSX takes it from Free first; only if there isn't enough there will it take it from Inactive.

Reply

Answer 14

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:51 PM in response to GFNG

Then system services are the ones taking all the real memory. I have removed login items to see what happens.

Reply

Answer 15

GFNG Author

Level 1

5 points

Aug 28, 2009 8:55 PM in response to Pondini

Pondini wrote:

GFNG wrote:
I have a late 2008 Unibody 13" Macbook 2ghz w/ 2GB of memory. I took a screen shot of the Activity Monitor before installing the update and I had 1.4GB of free memory and now I have only 769MB free.

How much Inactive memory is there? The only meaningful measure is the total of Free and Inactive.

When a running process releases memory, OSX removes it from Active, of course, but marks it Inactive and doesn't clear it, so it's faster to reassign if the same process needs it again. It only goes back to Free when the process that had it ends.

When a process requests new memory, OSX takes it from Free first; only if there isn't enough there will it take it from Inactive.

What I did was turn the macbook on and let it run for a while without running any app. Then measured the total free memory. Then I upgraded to SL, I let spotlight do its things. Restarted and without any apps running, I let it go but does not release any memory back and is taking up a lot.

Without any apps running, I have currently 780MB free memory and 175.1MB of inactive memory.

Reply