Where has all my RAM gone? (Super Slow!)

Have you tried to see if the problem is with the User account or the OS?

You can create a temporary Admin User account to see if the problem happens with it. If the problems go away, then I would check to see if there is a program running at login that is going rogue.

You can see what programs load at login by going to System Preferences/Accounts/Login Items - Each user account has it's own Login Items, and new accounts should not have any programs in the list.

The good news is that you've proven the OS is not the problem. If you start up in the problem account and launch Activity Monitor and leave the machine alone for 30 minutes you'll be able to tell if there is something kicking in or a process going nuts as the numbers will change.

If the numbers stay the same, then the problem is related to what you are doing with the computer. When you launch programs like your browser you can see the changes in Activity Monitor. With careful watching, you should be able to discover what is causing the ram usage to spike. Once you've discovered the source of the problem we can deal with that. I suspect you are having issues with old corrupt preferences, but don't have any idea what you have installed or what programs you are running.

Hope this helps.

I'm having the same issue. My wife and I have separate accounts on our iMac - mine has no problems and her's goes painfully slow. Safari will give her the spinning beach ball for several seconds before loading. Programs in the dock bounce several times before launching. I launch the same programs without issue.

Thanks for the info on Activity Monitor! I'll give it a try. Hope this helps.

Available RAM is the sum of the "Free" and the "Inactive" memory. The only difference being that Mac OS X knows what is in the "Inactive" memory and if the original owner would like to have that memory back, Mac OS X can give it back with very little overhead.

But if that memory is needed for something else, then Mac OS X will eradicate any previous association with that chunk of RAM, zero it, and give it to another process.

A major consumer of Inactive RAM is the file system cache, which is a performance improvement, as data in RAM is much faster to access than read it from disk.

So you need to add both Free and Inactive together to find out how much available RAM you have.

Log in on your slow account, open "Activity Monitor".

Initially set the pull-down menu near the top of the window to "My Processes" (since the problem only happens when you log in on your own account it's likely that it's a processor started only for that account and runs under your username.)

You can click on the column headers to sort by that column (clicking a header more than once will toggle whether it sorts ascending vs. descending.). Sort by "Real Mem" and take notice of what seems to be occupying the most memory. On my own Mac, that happens to be Safari, occupying about 340 MB).

Also click the "% CPU" column and take note of what seems to be consuming the most CPU.

You can change "My Processes" to "All Processes" if you want to view processes that were not started under your own username.

Once you determine what is taking all your resources, we should be able to help you correct it or disable it (it might be as simple as deleting a ".plist" file associated with the misbehaving application.)

mds is Spotlight - It may be trying to Index your drives so you can search quickly for files, or it's got some corruption going on.

If you have left your Mac alone after an upgrade for a couple of hours, and nothing changes, then Spotlight should be done with it's work. It's normal for Mac's to run a little slowly after first running a fresh install or upgraded OS. This sluggishness disappears after a couple of restarts as the OS gets it's caches and indexing completed.

Programs like Onyx can be used to clean caches and spotlight indexes so that they will be rebuilt from scratch: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070

The 'root' user is a special system account which must not be removed. On the Mac, every process must be associated with a userid, so there is a special userid for system processes. 'root' is one of these. There are several other special accounts as well.

In general, never attempt to create or remove any account other than via the "System Preferences" -> "Accounts" interface.

mds is the "meta data server". It's used by Spotlight and a few other things.

To give you a point of comparison, the mds process on my MacBook Pro (the computer has 4GB installed) is consuming about 41 MB of real memory (and about 380 MB virtual memory). The mds process on my iMac (the computer has 8GB installed) is consuming 130 MB of real memory (and about 390 MB of virtual memory).

Your numbers being well-over 1 GB sound like something has gone wrong. You should probably reset your Spotlight index.

An article that shows how to do this with the Spotlight preferences GUI is here:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/RebuildingSpotlightsDatabase/

It's important to note that after you reset the index, the Mac will begin rebuilding a new index. This process normally takes hours to complete. If you want to be sure nothing goes wrong, don't shut the computer down or put it to sleep while it's performing the rebuild.

A few processes who have names beginning with "md..." will show a large of amount of activity while the rebuild is happening. In particular I seem to recall "mdimport" was probably the busiest.

hwpienaar wrote:
Hi Tim.
Thank you for the advice. I did follow the list as refered to in resetting spotlight indexes. I left my computer on the whole night for the process to complete. Hopefully it did. There was nothing the next morning telling me the process is complete.

The problem still exist.

If 'mdimport' is either not running or is consuming very little CPU then it has finished rebuilding the index. mdimport will still run from time to time to index any new files added to the computer and/or old files that have been updated.

If you check the 'mds' process, is it now consuming less real memory (e.g. a few hundred MB is normal. More than 1 GB would be abnormal.)

A funny thing is that my computer show that the root user is disable, but the programs of the root user is still running as seen on the activity monitor, it is the processes of the root user that uses all my RAM and keeping my computer slow. It is so slow I cannot work on it. I am trying to resolve this problem know for a long time and no one where able to help me, until know. I feel hopeless!

In a Unix operating system, every process must be associated with a user ID. The operating system itself is not exempt from this rule. All processes which are started by the operating system will typically run as either 'root' or one of a number of other special accounts. There are actually quite a few of these special accounts, though you will typically only see processes running under a few of them. It is not possible for a user to actually log into the Mac using one of these special accounts (they have "locked" passwords - which basically means no password would be accepted to log in via one of these special accounts. The Mac simply will not allow a user to log in. When the accounts are needed, the operating system will kick off processes & jobs running under the appropriate special user accounts.

The fact that there are lots of processes running as root is not a problem and is not the cause of your memory shortage. Everyone who runs OS X has these processes running on their machine and aren't having memory shortages as a result.

The issue in your case is that one of these processes seems to be single-handedly gobbling up lots of your RAM, and we haven't been able to determine why.

I tried to download 10.6.2 but it does not download properly. I have tried this download many times. Might this be the reason for my problem, the fact that I am running 10.6.0 and not 10.6.2? Or are there other solutions.

I am far from any city and are not able to take my Macbook to any store for assistance.

I am concerned that not only are you having issues with the 'mds' process, but also unable to update your OS.

Go into "System Preferences" -> "Accounts" and verify that where you see your own user account listed you see the word "Admin" printed just below your name (in the list of accounts on the left side of the panel.) If not, let us know.

Next (assuming you are an 'Admin'), start "Disk Utility" and ask it to "Repair Permissions" on your Macintosh HD. You should also ask it to "Verify Disk". You will get some errors on "Repair Permissions" (Apple has a list of known errors that it will generate, but it will repair any problems not on Apple's list of known issues), but "Verify Disk" should come back with no errors. If "Verify Disk" has issues, please let us know and we'll explain how to do a "Repair Disk" (you can't perform the 'repair' on the same disk you booted from).

After doing this, restart your Mac, log in, run Software Update and see if you are able to apply the updates.

If Spotlight indexed your disk while some corruption existed on it (this what the Repair Permissions is meant to correct) then we may need to rebuild it yet again.

There is a more brute-force way to fix the problem involving the "Archive Install" (a way of re-installing only the operating system files on your computer without affecting any user accounts or applications you've installed... though you will lose some settings (e.g. you'll probably have to re-define your printers.)) but you wont lose any of your data or applications. I'd prefer to see if we can't fix your problem without needing to resort to this.

I'd say you really need to get the 10.6.2 update. I didn't realize you were not already updated to 10.6.2 because many users don't update their profiles on this forum. When you say you are trying to download it, are you using the Software Update program or trying to download the combo update like a file: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL959

Many bug fixes have been included with both 10.6.1 and 10.6.2. Shooting trouble on a system that has not been patched will be very frustrating for you and confusing to people here who assume you've got an updated system.

If you are not able to download the combo update to your machine, maybe you can download it to another? You can even use a Windows machine to get the combo update file, transfer it to a USB thumb drive, or burn it to CD to transfer the file to your Mac.

After installing the update I'd use Disk Utility to Repair your Permissions. Ignore any advisory messages that show up in the window, and wait for the program to say that the Repair is complete.

There is a more brute-force way to fix the problem involving the "Archive Install"

I do not think Snow Leopard has an Archive & Install option any more (which is a shame).