Lion - Memory Usage Problems

Roque Solis wrote:

I don't know if it's because of my Fusion but it seems to be related. I have a Win7 (2GB RAM) vm running all the time, since I purchased my iMac 2 years ago, and I've never had to reboot because of it. I really, really hope Apple does something about this soon.

If it is caused by something related to VMWare Fusion, why should Apple be the company to do something about it? Shouldn't that be the responsibility of the company that wrote the software?

Is there any response from Apple on this?

I cannot use Safafri anymore.

Memory usage:

webprocess 2.28GB

firefox 199mb

chrome 100 mb

safari 53

It only happens with the use of safari. No sites opened. If I start Safari the memory usage explodes.

Well it certainly would not be here on a user to user forum at any rate.

Hi Erikmoust, I worked with the business team at Boston store on this problem. It was new to them and they actually switched out my new machine over it. In the end, even with nothing non-native loaded on the machine Safari consumed the entire 8gb of ram in about 2 minutes. It wasnt every time but at least twice a day. It seemed to especially get started when I had my.yahoo.com running on Safari but then it extended to other sites such as the Container Store and a few other news sites. We looked at flash but that didn't seem to be it. The business team there (not the geniuses) recommended that I stop opening Safari for now and use Chromw or Firefox. I have been running on Firefox for two weeks now and have not consumed all the memory. However, it is still quirky- last night I was printing a photo from iPhoto and also had a finder window open and the Inactive Processes claimed it was using 5 GB of RAM, though I couldn't see it.

I am still evaluating this MacBook because it actually runs much worse than the Lenovo PC I have with the same specs. Ironically I reboot my Mac more than I ever rebooted my PC ... And it is twice the cost. But it is pretty.

I have a white macbook late 2006, which I had to employ a different app launching than th Dock, which was eating all the memory. I renamed the Dock.app and then I forced to quit. Since then my MB 2006 /13 machine is running like brand new under 10.7.2 . I am expecting a fix from Apple as it is not my apps that eat the memory, but the Dock.app

on a white macbook 2006, I had to rename the Dock.app and the kill it. I received a great stability and performance, through low cpu, memory and I use a different dock application. I hope Apple will repair it soon !

OK, so it's pretty clear from the posts below that it is an Apple issue. I was mentioning Vmware Fusion simply because it made sense to me but after closely monitoring the Dock process again, I've come to the realization that it's a Apple issue, whether it is with Lion or the Dock process. Although, I'm more inclined to believe that it is a Lion issue because this never happened before I upgraded my iMac to Lion, and I've had it for 3 years. THis morning I came in and my 'Dock' process was at 9.37GB of real memory. I noticed that the 'Inactive' memory in the 'Activity Monitor' was showng nearly 7GB. I started closing all of my applications, including and the 'Free' counter started to climb gradually. I left my Vmware for last, but after I shut it down the 'Free' memory counter climbed by 2GB, which is what my vm had allocated. The Dock process climbed another GB in size instead of decreasing. It just appears that Lion won't let it chew up more than 10GB, although I've seen it at 11GB before. I didn't realize that I had the option of using a different Dock application so I give it a try, although I'm hesitant to do that. I sure hope Apple gets this issue resolved quickly because I'm getting flashbacks of the Windows days when I had to reboot my PC several times a week just to get some work done, which is why I changed to Mac in the first place.

Roque,

I'd strongly suggestto fill a bug report. 7GB for the Dock are insane. Even if it is a matter of configuration files/third party application that must not happen.

Then you may want to try to restart the Dock. In Terminal type:

killall Dock

and see if the Dock's memory usage go back to normal.

Michelasso wrote:

Even if it is a matter of configuration files/third party application that must not happen.

Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent a poorly written third party item from using as much RAM as it can besides quitting it & making sure it doesn't restart. That may be a problem for Dock items that update their Dock icons -- as long as they are in the Dock, they will restart every time the Dock does.

R C-R wrote:

Michelasso wrote:

Even if it is a matter of configuration files/third party application that must not happen.

Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent a poorly written third party item from using as much RAM as it can besides quitting it & making sure it doesn't restart. That may be a problem for Dock items that update their Dock icons -- as long as they are in the Dock, they will restart every time the Dock does.

No matter what if the Dock is using 10GB of RAM instead of the regular 10MB the Apple developers are for sure more than willing (and interested) to take a look at it. 1000x the normal RAM usage for an OS X process is something that must be investigated in the Apple side.

Michelasso wrote:

1000x the normal RAM usage for an OS X process is something that must be investigated in the Apple side.

It isn't that simple. The Dock doesn't live in a walled garden. It runs as a user process, just like Finder, Safari, or any other user-launched app process. All are child processes of the launch daemon started as part of the user login process by the root level launch daemon. Its behavior is controlled by a combination of system & user domain files, including the per user ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.db file (in the user's home library folder). It stores & reads data from caches, including data in a per user launch services cache folder in /private/var/.

Problems with any of these files, or with the files of running apps that implement dynamic Dock icons, can cause unexpected results, including soaring memory use.

That's part of the reason a frequently suggested user troubleshooting step is to create a brand new user account for testing purposes. If the unexpected behavior vanishes when logged into (only) that new account, you know the problem is in the home folder of the affected user.

If not, the problem still may be caused by something other than Apple's code, for example a corrupted system level file.

R C-R wrote:

Michelasso wrote:

1000x the normal RAM usage for an OS X process is something that must be investigated in the Apple side.

It isn't that simple.

That's because it might not be that simple for us that it is better to have Apple looking at it. That site is there for having general users reporting bugs. As there is an Apple Seed program where a selected small group of users test the beta releases for Apple software where Apple specifically requires the partecipants to fill as many bug reports as necessary. An Operative System is a piece of software and as any (large) software is infected by (many) bugs. I don't see what's the big deal on reporting them. It takes few minutes and Apple developers actually look at them. I know because mine about this thread subject has been working on, with the developers requesting new info and diagnose outputs few times.

Regarding a workaround there isn't any ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.db file. Actually according to Spotlight there isn't any dock.db file in the ~/Library folder at all. The only files that should configure the Dock are the following:

:Logs Michele$ ls -l ~/Library/Preferences/{,*}/com.apple.dock.*

-rw------- 1 Michele staff 215 10 Ott 17:49 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences//com.apple.dock.extra.plist

-rwxr-xr-x 1 Michele staff 0 10 Ott 17:49 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences//com.apple.dock.extra.plist.lockfile

-rw------- 1 Michele staff 7729 31 Dic 10:58 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences//com.apple.dock.plist

-rwxr-xr-x 1 Michele staff 0 23 Ago 14:19 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences//com.apple.dock.plist.lockfile

-rw------- 1 Michele staff 103 23 Ago 14:19 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.dock.0019e362f924.plist

-rwxr-xr-x 1 Michele staff 0 23 Ago 14:19 /Users/Michele/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.dock.0019e362f924.plist.loc kfile

They have all the info Dock needs. Which basically is which applications are in the Dock and to which Desktop they are associated if any. Plus other configuration parameters. It is not that complicated.

What I would do is to try trashing all of them, After having first opened the Bug Report and got an answer . They get regenerated as any plist file in the Library. The price to pay is that all Dock's icons, Mission Control and the like must be reconfigured.

I HAVE ALSO PROBLEM WITH RAM that never had before to Snow, and i do the same things!!!! Apple FIX IT to make everyone happy!! Because when your customer is happy, you are happy! Jobs says..... We know you can do it, but we don't know if you want too!
Sorry for my English

Ive had this problem even after a clean install of Lion with 4 GB ram, i found a solutuion that is quite useful http://www.icoretech.org/2011/07/how-to-recover-memory-on-mac-os-x-lion-for-free / its a really good thing to do, it purges your RAM after a certain amount of time and you can choose that time, it would freeze your Mac for like 5 seconds though, its a really good way to not worry about your inactive memory, plus if you dont like it its totally reversable🙂 give it a try.

All such utilities do is flush all the system buffer caches, meaning the next time your computer needs data formerly held in RAM, it needs to fetch it from disk instead.

This article gives great background on this.