Lion - Memory Usage Problems

luuuuuuukee wrote:

Just weighing in... I know this isn't in any way a profound idea but after about a month of dealing with this BS I just switched to Chrome and ALL of my Lion memory issues have been solved.

After reading your post yesterday I decided to give Chrome another go. I started it and made it my default browser. It got updated from release 14 to 15. Not sure why. The fonts were looking ugly. Not broken, just different... Strange because I didn't remember having this issue. And the on screen dictionary doesn't work.

Anyway yes, the way Chrome manages the memory seems much better than Safari's one. But the CPU was always high. 50-60% instead of 10-15% with Safari. With the fan spinning. I started a virtual machine and I still have got 1GB or so of swap used.

Not to defend Safari, but I switched back to it. Funny enough today after a couple of hours WebProcess is using

only 407MB. And I have 1.09GB free out of 3GB RAM. I kno wit won't last, but it is an improvement compared to 10.7.0/1.

The best thing of 10.7.2 (with Safari 5.1.1) for me is that even having a large swap area OS X (and Safari) is responding. What is is swapped doesn't matter, unless it needs to get reused. As it should be. Before I just had to reboot.

I read them, they are for both PC and OSX... but if you want another method, go to HD/Library/Applications Support/Google where you will find an uninstaller.

the rogue process is npgtpo3dautoplugin Look for it in Activity Monitor.

I installed 10.7.2 2 days ago. I've noticed that the amount of RAM being used by Safari Web Content is way down compared to 10.7.1. While I wasn't having a problem with Safari chewing up memory before the update, that process was at the top of my memory usage according to Activity Monitor. Now it's always below kernel_task and usually below Safari. It has dropped from about 200 MB of RAM before the update to around 70 MB now.

Michelasso wrote:

R C-R wrote:

andreiil wrote:

I have an early 13' mbp core i5 with 8gb of ram.

After upgrading to lion 10.7.1 i have less than 500mb available after just a few hours since i turn it on.

The OS is designed to retain data in memory for as long as it might be useful. Free memory is memory unused for anything -- there is no benefit whatsoever in the OS freeing up memory while it still might be reused. If you add more memory to the system the OS will use it -- that's what it is for.

I think you rely too much on the saying "free memory is wasted memory". I don't know how in the name of God a web browser and few other small applications are allowed (allowed, not supposed) to fill 8GB (10-20 times the size of Encyclopædia Britannica?) of RAM in few hours.

There is only one explanation of this: lazy programming for the applications. Or too many abstraction layers --- programs written in some very high level language, that in turn is written in another language etc, down to machine code. These days programmers have become trully irresponsible and most think that computers have infinite amounts of memory, infinitely fast processors and unlimited storage and network bandwidth. This is why most software when it fails, fails badly (the error is recognized at the OS level).

Otherwise, R C-R is right about unused memory being wasted memory.

By the way, when I replaced Snow Leopard with Lion, my impression was that there was almost no inactive memory -- that was being purged pretty quickly. Then the situation became as with Snow Leopard -- always some (significant) amount of inactive memory is present and instead of using it, the OS will page out.

When people say Safari, this often incldes all the installed plugins, especially the awfully inefficient Flash Player and friends.

dkalchev wrote:

Otherwise, R C-R is right about unused memory being wasted memory.

I never deined that. But I (we) always specified "as long as it is made available when needed". Which is what 10.7.0/1 didn't do at all.

My huge page swaps (up to 3GB just using Safari) disappeared updating to 10.7.2. No matter how I pushed the memory. Even running a Win7 virtual machine my swap used now isn't above 1.5GB. With 10.7.1 I made it reaching 5GB. Lion still is a memory hog, But now it is usable. I don't know how anyone could keeping arguing that something was not wrong. It was totally messed up, no kidding. I can finally use Lion without the need of rebooting every few hours.

There are tons of pages on here, can't read all of them. However I was looking around for a simple solution for my daughter's iMac. Essentially what I did was for the following services:

Safari (or Firefox/Chrome)

iChat

Mail

iTunes

I did the Get Info on each app, and checked off the box that says start in 32-bit mode.

That made Safari go from 500MB or RAM to 60, iTunes from 560MB to 170MB... etc... In all I dropped my RAM usage by 2 gigs...

Simple, and free. Those services don't need 64bit operations really, you're not gaining anything by loading a page milliseconds faster or sending an email slightly faster.

you can apply that to any of your apps. Of course if you're in Logic or Aperture, you'll feel the pain if you switch down, but you can decide when you want to do that and when you don't.

R

This has been a fascinating debate on the one hand (havent' read every post but definetely some good stuff in here). That all said, I run an IT shop and even with 10.7.2 we see Safari eating up most of the RAM via it's new multip process window feature (and when Safari Web Content does crash, it doesn't bring down Safari). The only part I dont' get is that if there is enough space on the hard drive for a good amount of virtual memory, why in Lion does it seem that when the RAM is mostly used up, the machine starts crawling. I don't recall this being the case in prior versions.

a lot of this seems to be cause by VMWare Fusion. here is the fix if you are using fusion:

I am also having the same issue. Within an hour of starting a simple Windows 7 x64 VM - using 1 core and 2GB RAM - the processor usage and memory go through the ceiling on the Dock process. Literally using all available CPU processes and over 2-3GB of memory itself. This is not a usable or acceptable bug. I need to use Windows 7 for work and I cannot afford to spend time restarting things every 2 hours. It uses so many resources that time machine cannot back up and eventually the whole system becomes unusable - and not in the generlly thought of way but in th way I remember windows being when explorere and everything that goes with it was crashing. I have some theories and I am going to try to turn off the 3D aceleration and see if that makes a difference but I really hope this gets the attention of VMWare. I enjoy a lot of the feature the seperates Fusion from Parallels. I work in IT and need to be able to interchange and use different VM's on the fly before they go to our ESX server and/or other VMware workstation PC's. If it wasn't for that fact alone - I may very well already be downloading Parallels. I will update with how the 3D adjustment goes.

UPDATE (over an hour later): After Shutting down the VM and going into the settings - to help you that dont know (Virtual Machine>Settings>Display) and turned off the 3D Acceleration (which I don't need for my work applications) the problem seems to have stopped. The dock is now not going over 32 MB of memory used and the CPU use is stable (generally arond 0.1% or lower) !!!!

I hope VMWare fixes this soon, but for now this will be a decent workaround. Hope this helps more of you! I will repost this over at apple support.

cconsite1, I want to personally thank you for figuring this out. My problems are identical and I am using VM Fusion as well. This is clearly a problem with VM Fusion in combination with 10.7.2 as I used Fusion extensively before Lion (and with 10.7.1) without seeing these issues. Either VMWare or Apple (or both) need to figure out what the issues are.

Thanks again for contributing your investigation and solution. It helped me greatly.

P.S. I already bought Parallels and ported my Windows over. It just runs better with Lion (and in true full screen). I have the same VM flexibilities needs as you, but just couldn't live without Windows working well under Lion.

Robert: Thanks for suggesting switching to 32-bit mode for Safari. While I haven't had a problem with Safari hogging memory, I know some folks who are. I tried this on my own MBP and memory usage by Safari and especially by Safari Web Content is way down. I'll be sure to pass this along.

I hope VMWare fixes this soon

May I suggest you send a bug report to Apple, using their reporting form. Maybe also contact VMWare?🙂

https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn

I'm running Safari 5.1.1 on OS X 10.7.2 and am having huge problems with memory consumption. It's so bad I can't use Safari as my main browser any more, becuase if I leave it open through a day it begins to devour all my free memory! And I'm not exaggerating...from yesterday:

Safari was using over 2GB of memory! That's ridiculous. I don't use Parallels or VMWare Fusion either, so that's not causing it. I hope Apple can fix this quick, because it's pretty embarassing. I feel like I'm back to Firefox's huge memory leaks...

No one seems to have identified a permanent solution yet. However, I disabled all Safari extensions and the memory leak stopped. The culprit for mine was the 1password extension. I can't use 1password with Safari until they fix this, but at least I can use Safari again.

Bazokajoe: try uninstalling google video and talk plugin.

RobertSfeir wrote:

I did the Get Info on each app, and checked off the box that says start in 32-bit mode.

That made Safari go from 500MB or RAM to 60, iTunes from 560MB to 170MB... etc... In all I dropped my RAM usage by 2 gigs...

Simple, and free. Those services don't need 64bit operations really, you're not gaining anything by loading a page milliseconds faster or sending an email slightly faster.

Actually, that's not true; you're actually forcing each of those apps into a 32-bit address space, causing all sorts of address space gymnastics to occur, especially if they need to address more than about 3 GB of RAM for whatever reason.

Feel free to do it, but it will have performance implications for the app in question.