XCode swallowing all memory

Adding more memory will not fix the problem, it will only buy some extra time before Xcode has used up all memory again and the annoying swapping is back.

Same here, using XCode 4.2.

I have a late 2011 iMac and recently upgraded from 4GB RAM to 16GB to stop the annoying swapping that starts after some hours of use.

After reboot, about 3GB is used, only using XCode and Safari. Using only those programs, 10GB is used after one day of use and contually increasing. I then exit XCode and then only about 3GB is used again.

Note also that the memory usage reported by the Activity Monitor for XCode is low even if all memory is used up by XCode.

Apple, what about using Instruments on XCode to find your own memory leaks?

OK it's been while no one has said anything. You all solved it or gave up!?

MBPR with 16G, Mountain Lion, and Xcode 4.4. Same problem here with one project after an hour only 400 MB is left!!! And funny that I do nothing except watching Storyboard. I'm creating document now from project so all I am is in storyboard scrolling. No running, no debugging. and no nothing. Just watching.

It seems no matter how much you have memory it eats up all of it. And with 60 UIViewCntroller in the page is so slow and buggy to scroll around.

I hope I can find something after all.

Thanks for reply.

But there is nothing as a Xcode's cache in Library/Developer and there is no developer folder in System/Library.

I don't know how to clean up the Xcode's cache in ML+Xcode 4.4.

But As soon as I quit from Xcode they all goes to free part again. But still it hugs the whole memory.

I think I have the same problem, although mine is significantly more pronounced! I'm running a Mac mini 2012 with 8GB of ram and all the latest updates (as of yesterday).

Every time I click on a (any) view controller, or even worse try to edit the dimensions of anything within the view controller, my 8GB of memory collapses to about 6MB~ in under a minute. If I then stay with the view controller selected in about 5 minutes the swap used can be around 20GB.

This issue has basically rendered my interface builder useless, as I don't get the same memory leak when editing raw code.

Does anybody have any fix suggestions?

Same thing here, but on a 10GB Mac Pro. Xcode just eats all the memory.

I'm with frangipane - my machine is thrashing unusably, and it might as well have frozen.

I have a 5-year old iMac with 2Gb of RAM. It ran Snow Leopard and Xcode 3 quite well.

Very recently I shifted to Lion (the machine has a Core 2 Duo) and Xcode 4. So far I have only compiled "Hello World" type programs, as I'm trying to learn the new layout and settings. I very soon find that I have about 600 Mbytes of "inactive" memory and almost no free memory. If I try to do anything the disk drive whirrs, and I get a lot of swapping - it seems that the "inactive" memory isn't being given back. It got so bad that I eventually force-quit Xcode, and even then the machine took a while to react and stop frantically swapping.

I have tried the purge command in a terminal. It has helped. But I'd much rather have the "inactive" memory given back freely. Is there any way of disabling the "inactive memory" mechanism?

I was going to buy a new machine fairly soon anyway, but I'm annoyed that the software upgrade has changed my current machine from being useful to being quite useless for development.

When I first posted on this, I had an older machine with 2 gigabytes of memory, which was fine for Xcode 3, but not Xcode 4. I now have an 8 GB machine. At first I still had a lot of problems, but with Xcode 4.3.2 the problem seemed to be much better for me. Xcode still uses a lot of memory, but doesn't gobble it all up in the same way that it used to. I am doing development for Mac OS, not iOS, and I haven't gone to Xcode 4.4 yet.