Lion - Memory Usage Problems

Well all this does from what I know is use the genuine purge command from terminal in a plist which activates it every hour or so which the third party apps don't use the purge command.

Having read both your article and the one that William posted, I concur with William that your solution is more of a problem then a real solution. As he says all you are doing is forcing your system to slow down until the cache is rebuilt. Doing it hourly is certain to cause your Mac to be slow conbtinuously.

Allan

yeah well i guess, i guess it depends really, because when i dont have it i get mega amount of swaps used and within like an hour and a half i have to restart my laptop, but with that tweak i dont get swaps and my machine runs fine. its stupid because my sisters macbook same spec has lion on it and her macbook doesnt get sluggish at all... maybe its time i re-installed lion again without restoring it from backup.

obviously you know more about this stuff than i do. This was the only thing that worked for me.

It sounds like you have a problem with your Mac and this is not a solution but a bandaid. My guess is that you have either something on your Mac that is causing this.

Allan

The main issue is something like this should not be neccessary in order to use OS. I'm just completely annoyed that Apple could not fix memory issues I and many users here have been complaining for more than 2 years already. The last OS X which is just worked for me were Tiger. I've skipped Leopard, and both Snow Leopard and Lion give me the same memory issues - inactive memory keep growing and once free mem is depleted, system just start swapping.

Well, I've learned a new command, "killall Dock". Every time I come in and my iMac is bogged down, I open a Terminal, execute this command, wait a few seconds, and I'm back for a few more days. Again, this memory issue of mine, where my Dock process eats up up to 11GB of RAM, surfaced with Lion, and I've had this iMac for 3 years now. In fact, prior to this problem, I've never even had to get into any of Apple's forums.

Well, I think the issue is very dependant on workload. As long as I use my mac only for internet browsing, adium/skype/irc it could easily stay fine for weeks. But if I start to use it for software development - I can trigger memory issues very easy with netbeans, tomcat/glassfish, DB server running and browser running.

The main point is that OS should run without necessety of 'purge'-ing on timely basis. At least not Windows (XP, Vista, 7) nor *nixes need such a remedy.

This might be of some use to have an easier-ish to read output of vmmap's report on a processes purgeable memory?

paste into Terminal, supply admin password for sudo vmmap to run:

for process in $(ps -A | tail +2 | awk {'print $1'} | sort -n -r); do echo PID $process: $(ps $process | tail +2 | awk {'print $5'}); echo "$(sudo vmmap -purge $process | grep -B2 PURGEABLE)"; echo; done

I've noticed this problem not just with Safari but Firefox too under Lion. I switched to Chrome and am using the same websites and see no problems at all. Safari as well as Firefox were using up more than 1.5 GB of my RAM.

akell.nazir

What numbers are you looking at? physcial or virtual?

Real memory in Activity Monitor 🙂

This same issue is being discussed at some length on the VMware Fusion forums and the information there suggests there is an issue with APIs that Apple provides to "watch" the contents of directories. In the case of Fusion if host file sharing is on and the contents of folders on the Mac are automatically refreshed within the Virtual Machine via the subject API then Dock memory usage grows more or less uncontrollably as described in this thread. However if the automatic refresh is disabled then the Dock does not consume memory and the behavior is not present.

I've seen it discussed that other applications that would have a use for this API can cause the same issues. Some examples are things like Dropbox or other file sharing types of things that would monitor the contents of specific folders.

From what I understand I do think the ball is in Apple's court to find out what is causing the excessive use of memory by Dock and fix it.

akeel.nazir

How much physical RAM do you have in your computer?

Curious, how much virtual memory is displayed when using these programs?

Message was edited by: IvanOhio

On my system I have 16GB. This morning I came in and the 'Dock' process had 8.97GB. I did a "killall Dock' and it freed everything. Now everything is working great again. This is a weekly occurance, sometimes more than once.

Roque