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I've been checking my memory usage frequently because it keeps almost being completely consumed. A particular ReportCrash often uses over 1 GB in memory for short amounts of time.
This is a screencap of the information window for ReportCrash. The Virtual Memory Size often fluctuates between 4.5 and 5 GB, which is slightly worrying.
How should I fix this, or should I do anything about this?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.14
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.
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.
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 of the above is between the quote marks...
https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA
If pastebin is a problem for you then 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...
Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.
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.
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 of the above is between the quote marks...
https://pastebin.com/embed_js/KuvnghqA
If pastebin is a problem for you then 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...
Is the Mac crashing, or are applications crashing. There is a difference.
macOS will attempt to use ALL of your memory, because unused memory is wasted memory, especially on a laptop where the alternative is to access the more power hungry storage device. Keeping things cached in memory saves time and battery life.
Virtual Memory have a very little relation to physical RAM memory. First virtual memory addresses may be allocated but not have any assigned memory backing it. That is to day it is potential memory that the applications has not decided to use yet.
Shared libraries and frameworks get mapped into multiple applications and programs. Each gets its own virtual memory address space, but there is may only be a single copy of the code stored in memory. And as it is virtual memory, some of the code may not even be loaded into memory if it has not been references, or referenced recently. That is to say, physical memory given to code, may be taken back if the code has not been reverenced recently, and when the application need that code, it will be read from storage as needed.
Virtual memory that is modified, will be backed by the page/swap files. If macOS wants the physical memory for something else, it will write the physical memory to the page/swap files, and then give that physical memory to some other process. The application will still have virtual memory assigned, it will just not have physical memory under it.
Any unused memory is used as a file system cache. This is one way macOS avoids accessing physical storage when something previously accessed is needed again. If you only use a few GB's of physical memory for an application and macOS code, but do sufficient I/O, macOS will fill the rest of physical memory with with cached copies of the files you recently read. Actually it can also be caching the code of programs you recently ran as well. Basically anything in storage (code, data, etc...) can be in the file system cache. If macOS needs more memory for an applications, it can take memory away from the file system cache as needed.
So just looking at virtual memory is only meaningful, if All the applications and processes running on your Mac allocate so much virtual memory such that there is more kernel address space being taken up by virtual memory page tables that keep track of all the virtual memory, then there is memory left for actual applications. When this happens you will get a dialog box saying: "Your system has run out of Application Memory", and will often times list innocent applications for you to delete, when often times it is some background task that has consumed all the virtual address space.
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Are you getting the "Your system has run out of Application Memory", message?
There are recent reports here that this is a false alert cause by running CleanMyMac.
ReportCrash high memory usage
