Lion - Memory Usage Problems

Wow - this is the best news I've heard in a while.

It's not time machine, and you quit Safari, yet you are still having this problem. And Apple engineering is involved.

When Apple engineering got involved with my issues surrounding iOS mail (and now Mac OS Mail as well) and my IMAP mail provider (dreamhost), they were able to communicate to me what exactly was wrong, so that I could find a bug reported on their IMAP servers and show it to dreamhost.

Still, this is going to be a hard one to track down, unless it's easy to repeat. I've always thought it was a virtual memory design choice, which works very well with SSDs and not with HDDs. That is to say, I swap a LOT ever since Lion (between 2Gb and 3Gb routinely) and it was and is unworkable on my HDD computer. But the same is true on my SSD computer and it works fine. And in Snow Leopard, I never swapped, period. Never, except every now and then if I ran a huge HUGE process.

Fascinating. But frustrating. Good luck.

I started noticing this on 10.7.x and not on 10.8.x. I am running 15 MBP Retina.

This problem is prproducable 100% each time for me (only with sleep over night about 7-8 hr). Couple of times I did try to wake it in 4 hr and swap was about half size (7-8 hr).

So I've just been checking where my RAM is going... I just installed an extra 24GB Ram and now have a total of 28GB in a Early 2008 3,1 Mac Pro running Lion 10.7.4.

Any ideas... I just installed a SSD 256GB as a Boot Drive & partitioned into 3. 1 for OS Boot Drive 155GB, 2 for Photoshop Scratch 50GB, 3 for Photoshop Saving 50GB to...

At first look Adobe CS6 Photoshop does not use all the Scratch Disk... But I just tried in CS5 and it uses 99.9% of the same Scratch disk. Strange?

I was working on a 16Bit RGB Layered PSB at 10.6GB closed and 9.5GB Open.

Here are a few screen grabs of the CS6 Photoshop activity.

And here are the CS5 Photoshop Activity Screen grabs:

Can this be solved? Or is this the norm... Thanks in advance. Ben

I have put up with Safari Web Content chewing up all my memory in the hope that a new computer with Mountain Lion would solve the problem. Now I have a 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM and a fusion drive, yet Safari will relentlessly take all the memory. I've had it.

I am switching to Chrome today. Apple is simply unresponsive to an old problem.

I stuck an SSD in my 2007 MacBook (Lion), Safari still zero's the memory but the computer works fine like it doesn't really care about the ram. I thought that the Fusion drive had a lot of flash memory included and could handle Safari ok, guess not.

I've got a 2.4GHz MB 7,1 (the last of the all-white ones), which a year & 1/2 ago I maxed the RAM in with 2 Crucial 4GBs strips and all 8 Gigs shows up, & it all gets used according to RAM utils I've got, plus I swapped the factory 5400RPM 250GB HD with a Crucial 256GB SSD. In my eduguessing opinion, seeing as how I've got purt-near what you've got Bob, is that when my MB's RAM gets to about the 7GB in-use level, with the Free RAM completely gone & the MB running on just 1GB or so of Inactive RAM, RAM memory demands get swapped to the SSD (virtual RAM), and bein' as how the SSD's I/O memory movements are just so fast, much, much faster than it'd be with a 5400RPM HD, that the overall speed clipping is almost unnoticeable. For that reason & for many others (most notably that I can toss my MB around a bit without worrying about any read/write heads frying an HD's internal disks), I will never again have a standard HD, not of any speed, in any MB I'll have in the future. Now, I'm waiting for the 512 SSDs to drop down 50 bucks or so, and one of those are next for my MB. If there's somebody out there more knowledgeable about all this and sees some mistakes in my eduguess here, please add to this thread. Thx. Out...... Happy Mac'in! KK

Problem solved, SSD! I'm figuring in a couple of years you won't be able to buy a computer that doesn't have an SSD, and the old HD will be a relic like the floppy. Good riddance!

Does Chrome eat less memory?

I had Chrome installed as an alternative to Safari but had spates of the cooling fans going crazy. Activity monitor showed Chromehelps as the problem Uninstalled and now use Firefox which seems ok.

Hmm, I don't have any memory useag problems with Safari per'se

I guess there are about 35 tabs in 6 windows totally and some of them are pretty heavy sites like for example:

http://www.getdpi.com/forum/4-3rds-cameras/4390-fun-4-3rds-cameras-image-thread- 117.html

Safari: Version 6.0 (7536.25)

OS X: 10.7.5

MacPro1,1

How about using the cache tools in the develop menu - any help?

• Empty Caches—Delete all caches stored by the browser.
• Disable Caches—Turn off caching to see how a website loads the first time.

Just for the record, I've been following this discussion but also do not have memory problems. Occasionally CalendarbAgent,Safari WebKi or Spotlight indexingt grab significant CPU percentages but none of these lasts long nor consume inordinate amounts of RAM.

MacBook Pro 8.1

latest Safari version

Latest Mountain Lion

16 GB RAM

240 Gb SSD

etc

PS Not writing from laptop. I'll come back and fill in version numbers later.

Just like you I'm not having any issues, but then again like you I'm running Mountain Lion. I gave up with Lion in favour of ML and have no issues.

the problem isn't needing more RAM. the problem turns out to be -- SURPRISE!!! -- java and javascript. seriously, what a friggin' month for all things java, right? set your safari prefs like this and watch your RAM leakage end and safari behave normally again.

kind of shocking.

before:

annnnnnnnd after:

Good work, David. But turning off javascript is going to make browsing somewhat less dynamic-- actually a lot less dynamic.

Try just turning off Java and see what happens, if you wouldn't mind.

Keep in mind that although Java and Javascript share similar-sounding names, they are two very different things. Also, there is currently a Java update for Mountain Lion. Be interesting to install that and repeat your experiment.

Still, this may well be a step in the right direction. If you've a moment, try the above experiments and report back what you find. It'll be interesting in any case.

🙂

codefish:

you're correct on all counts. only my initial attempts weren't because i was confusing java and javascript: i just wanted to shut off anything that wasn't essential.

but yes, turning javascript back on does NOT cuase the memory leakage to occur again. it's just java. please post if this fix works for all ya'll. i'm curious to hear if it does.

and for the sake of solid accounting, i'm running:

OSX 10.7.2 and beyond (we may or may not be in the dev program)

Mac Pro tower

8BG RAM

Java SE6 r41

much obliged if each of you who post would also specify your java version as well...

david