Lion - Memory Usage Problems

Hi Teri,

"...if I click on that it just disappears. Is this purge automatic?"

Yes, the purge is automatic once you run it.

"...how do I get to a screen that shows what RAM I am using before and after doing the purge?"

Run Activity Monitor. It's in Applications/Utilities. You could just open it with Spotlight though.

Here's a screenshot of Activity Monitor. I literally just ran it and it went from 500MB to 1.95GB. Look on the lower left hand corner, the green text that "Free: 1.95GB". Yours will be a different number of course. Have Activity monitor up and make note of that "Free". Run Purge then in a few seconds that number will shoot up dramatically if there is ram available.

Best regards,

David

I have FREE 5.40 GB.

As far as "running" the purge. I have no idea if it ran, or not. All I ever accomplished was downloading it, but could never open or make it "do" anything. Does it just work once it is downloaded? That seems kind of odd.

I have 8 GB of RAM and still have only 4 hours of battery on a full charge but I don't have speed problems since maxing out RAM. Hoping the next versionw will fix all this stuff, especially battery life. I can't even watch an entire Netflix movie on a full charge. That is sad.

I have no solution, but here's what I've observed on my MacBook Pro. This just adds to something being strange in Lion or one of the Lion-based Apps.

I'm running Lion 10.7.4. When I first installed Lion, everything was fine. At either 10.7.2 or 10.7.3 the memory issues started, although they may be due to an iTunes, possibly 10.6, or Mail update. I have tried killing all of the login items but that didn't help. I normally have Mail, Firefox, iTunes, and Preview open all the time. What I noticed was that after 5 or 10 minutes, my free memory (I have 8GB RAM) would start dropping rapidly. Once the system is down to a few MB the system would becomes slow. Many more beach balls and so on. Generally a pain. Then I started playing with those Apps. Preview didn't seem to matter. I could run Mail and Firefox together or iTunes and Firefox together without difficulty. But as soon as I run Mail and iTunes together, down goes the free memory.

Once the memory starts dropping, I can free it up, either with Freememory or the purge command and it starts dropping again as soon as the app or command finishes. At that point, it doesn't matter whether or not I'm running anything. Sometimes, it will settle down and stop. Otherwise I have to restart.

I cleaned out the Mail cache and repaired permissions and tried again. Things seemed okay until I downloaded some Apps in iTunes. Then the memory started dropping. I will be keeping an eye on this over the next few days. Whether that's it or not, it does seem to be iTunes that's triggering the problem. However, iTunes doesn't have anything abnormal allocated to it based on what I see in Activity Monitor.

I Have the same problem editint video on Final Cut Pro X 10.0.4, running on iMac 27" Core i5 3 GHz with 4GB DDR3 1333. Couse I copy lots of video segments and past in another layer.

Just install and run Free Ram Booster.

http://www.tweaknow.com/freerambooster.php

Try turning java off in safari

Is there a Safari process running even if Safari isn't? I use Firefox.

Both Firefox and safari will cause a massive memory leak when some web pages run java code.. Chrome does not seem to have this problem. So try turning off Java in your browser and see if that helps.

First i want to thank the community for putting their heads together to come up with solutions, if only tips.

I'm on hold with an apple "senior tech" at this time, and he's only now learning what inactive memory is as i describe to him how caching works.

In calling "express lane" i introduced the issue by asking "you must know about this, its well-documented in discussions, but can you tell me how to 'work around' it, what processes are causing it, so that i could avoid interrupting my workflow by running purge every 10 minutes".

Support, at least, is telling me that this is the normal operation of the computer :/

Hello All,

I went to Applications, selected Safari (I did not oppen the App), and then I did a Command+i. I checked the "Open in 32-Bit Mode" box. This process helped reduce Safari, and Safari Web Content Real Memeory Signifigantly in Activity Monitor.

I also performed the same process on the System Prefrences Applicaton. This process reduced my Page Outs in Activity Monitor from about 145 bytes to 0 bytes!

Lion is now consuming much less RAM. I want to upgrade to OS X 10.8. I hope Apple addresses the memory and battery issues with the new OS.

I hope this helps!

I'm running Lion 10.7.4, on a Late 2008 MacBook Aluminium 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD

Just to add: restart your mac after you make the changes to 32-Bit Mode.

Is it just me, or did nobody read:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342? 😁 I haven't read the complete thread, but I believe Inactive Memory is not such a big deal, as from the horses mouth - it is just free memory with preference to a previously active application. The hope... is that this is optimization.

- C

All I know is that when the green memory band gets small, the beachball spins a lot. I restart my Macs every day or so, and am looking at a Crucial SSD upgrade, which may help things.

Is it just me...

Or does nobody (that is, those who say everything is hunk dory) understand that the issue is the amount of released Inactive RAM is usually of insufficient size and the speed at which it is released and allocated take so long, that when a large amount of RAM is needed from the Inactive pool, the system dramatically slows down as it allocates Inactive RAM in a piece meal approach. That is the issue.

the issue is the amount of released Inactive RAM is usually of insufficient size and the speed at which it is released and allocated take so long, that when a large amount of RAM is needed from the Inactive pool, the system dramatically slows down as it allocates Inactive RAM in a piece meal approach.

Agreed. These chaps http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120410153721860 have been debating a script which sets limits on virtual memory, to initate 'purge'. As one person argues, how can one command be more effective than the VM development of countless computer scientists. But has anyone else experimented with imposing limits on VM? Could sacrificing some ram to force the OS to dump the swap files be an effective bandaid to one part of Lion memory woes? If in this thread, i can't recall the conversation.

It's not "more effective."

All purge does is empty the system caches, forcing the system ro reload everything it might want from disk.

That makes "memory used" stats look really good, but it's of dubious value to a running system except is certain special circumstances.

It's exactly like dragging your "Applications" folder to the Trash, selecting "Empty Trash" then noticing, gee, you've got a lot of free disk space.