Lion - Memory Usage Problems

My understanding is that when RAM gets full a swapfile gets created.

And then these swapfiles eat up HD space

The thread is mainly discussing high RAM use and CPU load, but there are various things that may spill over to cause HD space to reduce, such as:

Snapshots that use HD as a cache, and are thinned automatically if the user needs the space. These can be turned off in Time Machine preferences.

Mail attachments, that get copied for faster access. There is a Terminal command to clear these.

find -d ~/Library/Mail/ -type d -name Attachments -print -exec rm -rf {} \;

Adobe AIR creates thousands of small files.

Some other third party apps, AutoCad I think was one.

My Activity Monitor shows this. What is your own like?

David Ferleger wrote:

My understanding is that when RAM gets full a swapfile gets created.

And then these swapfiles eat up HD space

Swapfiles are an essential part of any modern VM (virtual memory) management system. They are what temporarily hold the data the memory manager swaps out from RAM (real memory).

Because they are essential, some OS's reserve an entire disk or disk partition for swapfiles. OS X can be configured to do this but since that wastes a lot of disk capacity that may never be used, by default OS X creates just one relatively small swapfile (swapfile0) on the startup disk at startup time (long before RAM gets full). Subsequent swapfiles are created on the fly on the same disk, if & when the first swapfile isn't large enough for current VM needs.

Some or all of these other swapfiles may be deleted before shutdown, depending on memory use patterns & how much data has to be shuffled among them. All the swapfiles are deleted at shutdown time & the process begins again with just one swapfile on the next startup.

RCr - thanks for the cogent description. Well said.

For information of others - and encouragement to check obvious things:

After much consideration and research, my conclusion is simply this --- My MacBook Pro 17" disk which is 250 GB was truly just about full with 228 GB used. I had recently added many GB to a dropbox folder shared with my large iMac desktop. That is when my problem started.

So, the swapfile process, normally invisible and not noticed, suddenly became a BIG issue. As the measley 20+GB left available on the disk was getting swiftly eaten up by swapfiles.

Those swapfiles, by the way, were being created by Safari. When Private Browsing was turned on, no swapfiles created.

Solution: EITHER buy a new MacBook Pro with larger hard drive. Or erase stuff on the current one.

I've listed the MacBook Pro 17", 250 GB SSD, 2.3GHz, on ebay for next 3 days if anyone is interested/

David

David Ferleger wrote:

So, the swapfile process, normally invisible and not noticed, suddenly became a BIG issue. As the measley 20+GB left available on the disk was getting swiftly eaten up by swapfiles.

The system also routinely creates other kinds of temporary files besides the swapfiles used for VM. Some are also essential for proper operation of the OS, & depending on the tasks being performed, some can be surprisingly large. If there is not enough available space on the startup drive for all these temporary files, bad things can happen, including system instability or even file corruption & data loss.

OS X has built-in routines to warn users when startup disk space begins to run dangerously low, but (in part because OS X is a multithreaded, multitasking OS) it isn't always possible to predict when that will occur until there is so little space left that the OS can't even do the housekeeping necessary to display the warning message.

Largely because of this, many experienced OS X users recommend that as a rule of thumb, at least 10-15% of the startup drive's capacity should always remain unused (free) & available for system use. This usually provides a generous safety margin for avoiding this kind of issue. It has other benefits as well, especially to reduce unnecessary, performance robbing file fragmentation for conventional HD's, & (to a lesser extent) to allow SSD's to better optimize their wear-leveling routines to extend their life.

Solution: EITHER buy a new MacBook Pro with larger hard drive. Or erase stuff on the current one.

Another alternative (which may not be practical for you) is to offload some large, less frequently accessed user files to an external HD. If you are anything like me, you probably have a lot of stuff on the laptop's internal drive that you are not likely to need when you are away from home but don't want to lose. If so, a large capacity "stay at home" USB HD might be an inexpensive solution.

Just to underline what mightymilk has been trying to report here with great patience.

I do have the same problems. I used to do some heavy duty rendering and worked with Photoshop, FCP and Nuke open at the same time on my MBP before while having Mail and Safari open in the background. Since I installed Lion weeks ago I get spinning color wheel or moments the system just hangs with just Safari, iTunes and Mail open.

I'm running Lion 10.7.2 on:

Macbook Pro 17'' mid 2009

2,8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB

So maybe we can stop explaining why this behavior fits in peoples believe in Apple religion.

It ***** and is unacceptable to pay so much money for equipment which then silently turns into crap with just one software update.

The op's issue is with safari taking up multiple gigs of ram this is probably due to a bad plugin. Neither you or the op has posted what activity monitor is showing them. Do you use gmail? Do you have the google voice and video chat plugin on? Screenshots of activity monitor with real memory set to descending and CPU % set to descending?

You have a good point about the google plugin for some users but, way, way, WAY earlier in this discussion we (the OP and a few others active, then) tried with and without extensions and plug ins, but the original problem persisted. I still think Safari (Safari Web Content) on it's own was/is the culprit, especially with multi-tabs and pages that auto-refresh.

Al 😉

well I hope all of you filed this with Apple in http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html🙂

I too am experiencing memory usage problems in Lion. I recently got 8GB of RAM in my MB Pro, yet consistently run out of memory. I have the following apps open: Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Sparrow, Adium, Netbeans, Eclipse, Photoshop, Powerpoint and an Ubuntu VMWare. It might seem like a lot, but 8 GB of RAM should handle it easily; however, I now only have 10 MB of Free RAM and everything has slowed down to a crawl. Compare it to my Windows PC, where I routinely concurrently run: 20 Chrome + 20 Firefox tabs, 2 Virtual Machines, Netbeans, Powerpoint, Word, Photoshop, InDesign, League of Legends + Battlefield 3 and have no problems with the same ammount of RAM. There is something wrong in Apple's memory management process.

I just did submitt my feedback. Thanks for sharing this. I was looking for a place to submitt my comments, but was not able to find this page before.

Thanks,

Uncas

punkkid2 wrote:

I too am experiencing memory usage problems in Lion. I recently got 8GB of RAM in my MB Pro, yet consistently run out of memory. I have the following apps open: Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Sparrow, Adium, Netbeans, Eclipse, Photoshop, Powerpoint and an Ubuntu VMWare. It might seem like a lot, but 8 GB of RAM should handle it easily; however, I now only have 10 MB of Free RAM and everything has slowed down to a crawl. Compare it to my Windows PC, where I routinely concurrently run: 20 Chrome + 20 Firefox tabs, 2 Virtual Machines, Netbeans, Powerpoint, Word, Photoshop, InDesign, League of Legends + Battlefield 3 and have no problems with the same ammount of RAM. There is something wrong in Apple's memory management process.

are you punking us here? How much ram did you lot for ubuntu on VMWare, this is honestly a separate post worth if you want help, these forums are run more as a per user basis and it doesn't benefit you if you have a separate question to post it ontop of someone elses (unless you are trying to help them or exapnd on the OP's concerns without help.

The VM won't use up more than 1 GB memory. However, my Wired Memory is 1.5 GB and my kernel_task is about 800 MB.

Here's a question. How many of you were here through the whole release of OSX 10 ? From 0 to present (7). I have been, and this is strangely reminiscent of all the early OSX's 0 through 3. They all had horrible memory managers. One after another was poor, only improving slightly from version to version. 10.0 was un-useable. 10.1 just barely. 10.2 was somewhat usable and 10.3 you could almost call a G.M. (Gold Master)

Let's call a spade a spade. As Lion stands right now (even with the biggest badest Mac out there) BLOWS when it comes to memory management. With early versions of OSX It didn't matter how much RAM you had. It always wanted more and didn't run one bit better with more.

Punkkid2 isn't doing anything OSX shouldn't be able to do. When this OS first came out, it was touted as bullet proof. I saw people open up every app. they add (over a hundred) and the system wouldn't crash. Slow a little, but the program in the front ran well. If something did crash, it was the app. not the OS.

They wrote bloated code and they need to trim the fat to make it run better.

I've been sitting with this OS since it came out and it wasn't pretty in the beginning. (Well, pretty to look at, but that's about all) Thank god for OS 9 or we would have all been sunk.

Mark, I actually agree with everything you just said there, but have you ever submitted any feedback to Apple about your experiences? As you point out, things to do with early versions of operating systems are usually a little wonky in the beginning but if you've been having system crashes, then you should consider sending those to apple and letting them know http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html.

what this does is help them look for things to fix for each build. The main thing to remember here is that there are so many itterations of the Macintosh Computer that supporting all of them is a huge task because there are millions of different users that use their machines in completely customized environments.

Another thing that I think you should put into consideration are all the vendors that have failed to make support for Lion even though we've paid a significantly more amount of money for their software. I think this is a bigger issue then early itterations of a brand new operating system which usually runs fine out of the box.