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WindowServer is right now at the top of the list on the Memory page in Activity Monitor. It is using 1.32 GB!
Doesn't seem right. I don't recall this ever happening before.
Might have started with my recent upgrade from High Sierra to Mojave.
Is there some way to fix this?
Thanks!
late 2014 retina mac
macOS 10.14.6
16 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
Etrecheck report attached.
Well, John Galt says this is normal, but BDAqua asks for the report.
I'm curious about the Canon stuff, so I'm reporting back. I contacted Canon and they were very reluctant to help me, as I had ditched my Canon printer months ago and now have an Epson. But the last person I talked to at Canon said I could just remove it. But I suspect they just wanted to get rid of me.
Also, I skipped the login items, which in this case is just Dropbox.
TIA!
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?
Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.
If that doesn't do it, we might find the problem with an etrecheck report.
EtreCheck is a FREE simple little diagnostic tool to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. It will not display any personal info.
Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…
Whew, they've changed pastebin & made it harder, but after pasting in, click Create new paste button, then Embed button, then copy the URL...
<script src="https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA"></script>
The important part is...
https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA
Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck. In a Reply before you click post, look for this to add longer texts...
This could be a known issue gifted to us with Security Update 2020-004:
2020-10-18 15:46:12 ScreenSaverEngine.app High CPU Use
Executable: /System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app
That update made OSX work long and hard to load any savers from a folder of images, Apple's or user-created. If your current saver is imagenased, try changing it to one that does not have an image feed, like Word of the Day, Flurry, Arabesque, Message, Shell, etc.
2020-10-15 03:20:10 Dropbox.app High CPU Use
Executable: /Applications/Dropbox.app
Make sure DP is not "Stuck."
This is totally unacceptable:
Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:
Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)
Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) (35) 6.20 GB (Google, Inc.)
Google Chrome 972 MB (Google, Inc.)
I'd tell Google to push off.
However, for future reference, remember that since 2013, Apple's RAM management changed to a one that will use all the RAM it can get. It is a "Free RAM is wasted RAM" way of thinking that, instead of fetching, stages RAM for faster execution.
Starting with macOS 10.9, the new metrics in Activity Monitor are Memory Pressure and Swap used, not "Free" RAM. At the time of your test, Swap was zero. In this real-world example, the Mac has 12GB of physical RAM and, applying pre-2013 metrics to the 11GB “Used,” appears to be in deep trouble:
However, the true situation is shown in the fact that Memory Pressure is nil and Swap used (a measure of Virtual Memory usage) is zero. And, at the time that chart was generated, the computer worked without issue.
I contacted Canon and they were very reluctant to help me, as I had ditched my Canon printer months ago and now have an Epson. But the last person I talked to at Canon said I could just remove it.
How'd I miss that???
Yes indeed, they should all be removed.
Seems to me that as long as the memory pressure is green, it's okay.
Well, I've read many times that that is supposed to be true, in practice I find less than roughly 100 MB of free RAM & things start crawling to a halt, like too much thinking about what goes where or something. Might depend on which other Apps are running or the OS compressing RAM or such... have never been able to track down the cause, only experience it.
Try this browser, it uses 2/3rds the RAM of Chrome, Firefox, & Safari & is Chrome without google & without many Ads as a default...
Below is an example of where it was slowing in green Memory Pressure, loaded Parallels, (yellow), then Windows 10, (orange), as a trick to force the OS to free up RAM believe it or not.
Then simply quitting Win10 & Parallels speeds me up again!
It is not necessarily a problem with memory management. It could be a memory leak. It could be a setting. I could be a corrupted plist file. It could be a number of things!
I've rebooted the computer numerous times since this came up. And it remains.
Still happens in Safe Mode, but with a much smaller amount.
I rebooted regular, logged in without startup items, and it started at 100 MB. I opened Mail and Chrome and Preview and it's still at about 100 MB. I ran etrecheck. I will run it again when it reaches 1 GB or some significant fraction of that and report back, posting the report.
John could very well be right, it uses 776.7 MB on my current 10.14.6 iMac, but only 168.2 MB on my 10.13.6 iMac running about the same stuff.
Don't spy a specific problem in he report, but plenty of "High CPU Use" reports, combined with the problematic...
Virtual Memory Information:
Physical RAM: 16 GB
Free RAM: 44 MB
Of course Chrome is a real hog for resources.
@BDAqua
Can I click remove on the canon files?
Yeah, I noticed the High CPU Use. On a per program basis:
backupd - No surprise here.
ScreenSaveEngine.app - Yes, i use my screen-saver a lot.
signpost_reporter - I have no idea what this is.
Dropbox - I don't know if this is normal behavior for this. I've been thinking of switching to iCloud.
I don't see why the VM is a problem. The File I/O cache is supposed to use up to most of available RAM. Seems to me that as long as the memory pressure is green, it's okay. This File I/O cache is a trick used not only by macOS, but also OpenVMS and I think Linux, and probably at least some other flavors of Unix. I once had only 8 GB of RAM, and would sometimes get into the yellow, and even red at times. Too many google tabs open! But I upgraded to 16 GB, as I knew I'd be using Final Cut on top of that, though it didn't use as much RAM as I thought it would. Have been mostly fine since.
I used to use FF, but on my old system with Snow Leopard it would frequently fill up my RAM, even after upping it from 2 GB to 6 GB. I like Chrome because back when I switched, YouTube videos played much better on it than they did on FF. The main thing I miss in FF is the Bookmarks sidebar. No need to keep switching tabs to peruse the bookmarks. But Chrome doesn't seem to cause a problem until I have maybe 40 or 50 tabs open! https://www.merriam-webster.com/ will crank up your GPU and make your mac run hot! And it can take a while to close the tab.
@Allan Jones - Well, after digging up some old screenshots, I see that I had this problem even in July. So it's probably not that. Since I've had this since at least as far back as July, it looks like Mr. Galt is right. Still, is it safe for me to use Etrecheck to remove the canon files? I did run uninstall for canon a while back, but these two files remain.
DropBox was stuck for a while. Turned out the bandwidth limit was set to 50 KB / second! And it was syncing a file something like 20-40 GB in size. But not since my last reboot. And I haven't caught it in the act with Activity Monitor yet.
Well, I like Chrome because back when I switched (I had 6 GB and Snow Leopard at the time), FF would just keep gobbling up more and more memory and I'd have to kill it or reboot. And Chrome plays back YouTube videos much more smoothly, at least back then it did (makes sense, as both are from the same company). I do miss the FF bookmarks sidebar, allowing you to peruse your bookmarks without going back and forth between more and more tabs (okay, sometimes you want a new tab each time). Also I liked it was a single-click with FF. Oh, FF has a better word-advance algorithm.
Yes, using the free RAM for file caching is a great idea. It is also done by OpenVMS, Linux, and possibly some flavors of Unix. And I like the memory pressure bit, though no one outside Apple seems to know what the algorithm for it is.
@BDAqua
I removed the Canon files and rebooted. Started getting ads on YouTube again, but without the delay for the Skip Ads bit, but now it seems fine. I doubt the two are related.
Well, based on my experience with OpenVMS many years ago, excessive paging and swapping can severely reduce performance. OpenVMS has separate paging and swapping files. macOS only has Swap on Activity Monitor, which I'm guessing includes both. (Actually, I'm not sure if these are separate things with macOS. The memory management is rather different. I can't find a current description of it like I could with some particular older version.)
In your red case above it seems to me that the OS should write the cached files to disk so as to free up a gig of RAM. But it may have already been overloaded by excessive paging or swapping, causing disk thrashing.
Thanks!
Oh yes, the Red above was paging, which I forced it to do with the Parallels/Win10 bit, but it was slowing at the beginning of the green in that shot, speed returned after simply running & quitting Parallels/Win10, green before & after, but 22 GB used before, 16 GB after. :)
"Below is an example of where it was slowing in green Memory Pressure, loaded Parallels, (yellow), then Windows 10, (orange), as a trick to force the OS to free up RAM believe it or not."
Yes, I believe it. I did something similar on OpenVMS to study how the memory management worked.
betaneptune wrote:
WindowServer is right now at the top of the list on the Memory page in Activity Monitor. It is using 1.32 GB!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Let the MacOS manage memory. It can do it better than you can. Reboot the computer if you think there is a problem with memory management.
You don't have to wait to do the report.
Process WindowServer is hogging memory. How to fix it?
