Q: Lion - Memory Usage Problems

I also have had problems with OS X Lion.  On my iMac (a mid 2010 3.06GHz dual core 2 duo with 4 Gb of RAM) the computer just freezes and a hard reset does not resolve the problem; I get the start up tone and then the loading disk spins in perpetuity.  I restored the iMac, assuming that there had just been a 'glitch' and within the space of less than 24 hours, I had to do it again.  Having subsequently searched the web I noted that I am not alone and worryingly a YouTube post shows a far higher spec machine than mine (newer and with 16Gb of RAM) running alarmingly slowly.  I have now restored my Snow Leopard installation as Lion is currently unworkable for me and will not install the upgrade that I have already paid for until Apple produce a suitable patch to resolve the issues that appear to be fairly widespread.  I am suprised that Apple appear to be Beta testing their latest operating system in the market place - I moved away from the PC market because I was fed up with problem after problem as immature operating systems were marketed as polished product.  Whilst I appreciate that no software product will ever be perfect out of the box, Apple have less scope to get it wrong than the PC market because they control their product specification.  How have they got it so badly wrong this time?

I am having a simiar problem with memory and heat on my Mac Book Pro with 2.66 Ghz Intel Core Duo processor and  4GB of memory.  When I try to run Final Cut Pro X, my system becomes useless.  I did not have this problem with Snow Leopard.  Does anyone have anything other than add RAM?

Dperr23 wrote:

 

I am having a simiar problem with memory and heat on my Mac Book Pro with 2.66 Ghz Intel Core Duo processor and  4GB of memory.  When I try to run Final Cut Pro X, my system becomes useless.  I did not have this problem with Snow Leopard.  Does anyone have anything other than add RAM?

 

 

 

Whoa!  You have 1.78 MBs per second of Page Outs!  That's over 400 pages per second, which means your system is thrashing.

Things may get better if you shut down the other memory-consuming apps such as EyeConenct, EyeTV, Safari and iCamSource.

Lion uses more RAM than Snow Leopard.

Same here.

My late 2008 MacBook worked fine with Snow Leopard and after upgrade to Lion it became more or less unusable. Today I upgraded from 2GB to 4GB and was first happy over the huge improvement.

At first I had 1GB memory free running Xcode 4, Safari and Firefox. Everything seemed to be OK.

Now, after some hours of use, the free memory has gone and I have not used the computer much. Even if I only leave it unused, the free memory decreases. I see that Safari and Firefox uses up the most memory, but this can't be the only explanation.

I've also had problems with Xcode, I've got build problems that are not due to code problems but probably due to memory problems. After reboot, the unchanged code builds like it should, without the mysterious build errors not possible to connect to the code.

There must be a serious bug in the memory management in Lion!

I can't upgrade to more than 4GB, twice as much as I had with Snow Leopard working like a charm. Although 4GB gives me some time before the memory has been eaten up, I need to reboot quite often to release memory.

I regret upgrading to Lion, I hope Apple will fix the bug(s) soon or I have to go back to Snow Leopard even though this will cost me a lot of time.

Hans, my post at this link may help explain things for you.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3238726

John Kitchen wrote:

Things may get better if you shut down the other memory-consuming apps such as EyeConenct, EyeTV, Safari and iCamSource.

Also make sure you are using Lion-compatible versions of apps not supplied by Apple as part of the Lion update.

I went ahead and maxed out the RAM, and I am seeing better results.  Lion must use significantly more memory than Snow Leopard.  If that is the case, Apple should recommend 8GB as the minimum.  

I had previously put Mail into 32 bit mode and posted that there was  no change in RAM usage but thanks to John's tip I now realise I didn't reboot. Have just quit Mail. checked the 32 bit box under Get Info, rebooted and restarted Mail. It took about 10 mins to start (35 mins yesterday in 64 bit mode). Now RAM usage has gone from 2.35GB to 1.75GB and overall RAM used 2.99GB instead of sometimes 3.99GB over the last week.

Many thanks. This looks like a temporary workaround until a fix appears as I already have the max amount of RAM (4GB) for this machine.

After having Safari 5.1 paging like crazy many times few hours ago I went as far as totally disabling the virtual memory. I followed this hint: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=201106020948369

Obviousy it's manly for testing purposes. Other than Safari now I have a Chrome session with a dozen of tabs open. Plus Mail and few small things. My total used memory is 2.3GB out of 3GB, with WebProcess + Safari taking around 530 MB (instead of 1.2 GB).

The idea is that since I saw that Safari started to page at least 1GB of memory when the free RAM was under 100MB but still having plenty (1GB or more) of inactive memory I wanna see if now will take on the inactive memory. Or crash...

Regarding the idea that OSX Lion needs at least 4GB to run I would like to remind that Apple is still selling the MacBook Air 11" with 2GB of RAM and OS X Lion (kernel running at 64 bits) pre-installed. Personally, until Safari starts to behave crazy I've seen that 3GB of RAM are more than enough for regular use. I can even run a Windows XP virtual machine on top of it.

Michelasso wrote:

 

<snip>

Regarding the idea that OSX Lion needs at least 4GB to run I would like to remind that Apple is still selling the MacBook Air 11" with 2GB of RAM and OS X Lion (kernel running at 64 bits) pre-installed. <snip>

The MacBook Air has an SSD instead of a hard drive.

When the MBA pages, the Page Outs and Page Ins are an order of magnitude faster than any Mac using a hard drive.  So the MBA can tolerate small RAM.  Up to a point.

MBP 15'' 2.2ghz early 2011 8gig, OS Lion installed

With Safari and Parallels (2Gig, 2 Processor allocation), all of the RAM is used up and the laptop is already paging out.

Safari is the biggest culprit.  It seems that as browse more pages, the memory usage increases.  I have this feeling that the safari cache is residing in the RAM rather than the HD.

This is not the case when I run Final Cut.  I would have expected more resource need with video editing but it seems that safari has more needs.

John Kitchen wrote:

 

The MacBook Air has an SSD instead of a hard drive.

 

When the MBA pages, the Page Outs and Page Ins are an order of magnitude faster than any Mac using a hard drive.  So the MBA can tolerate small RAM.  Up to a point.

According to some bechmarks I checked in the past (and I double checked now. For example: http://www.barefeats.com/mbps02.html), the SSD on average are 5-10 times faster than the fastest HDD. Apple SSD in that test are even half of the speed. Fast, yes, but still much slower than the RAM speed.

But that's not the point. As many of us reported OS X Lion per se is happy with 2GB of RAM. As long as we don't run Safari. My first action after seeing that Safari was driving my poor MacBook nut has been to switch to Chrome. et voilà... Never above 2GB out of the 3GB. Unless running a virtual machine, sure. Then due to the corrupted Chrome full screen (and for investigating) I decided to switch back to Safari. That WebProcess simply is leaking. I restarted Safari last night, left the computer of and its memory usage doubled. The other Chrome session I had open since yesterday early afternoon instead is quite. Witth similar tabs open.

OSX when running Safari 5.1, sometimes suddendly decides to swap out hundreds of MB of memory. In my case up to 1.2GB. To people with higher RAM even 3GB. Even, as it happened to me yesterday, still having more than 1Gb available in inactive memory. To "buy more RAM" is not the solution and this case it doesn't  seem to be either a workaround. It's also impossible for people like me that are phisically limited to 3GB. To buy a new MacBook is not an option either (and it would be a rather obnoxious thing to suggest).

Curious to see if I solved my issue with way too much "Inactive Memory" being held and not recycled which leads to "Page-Outs" and slow-downs.

If you are having issues and have Java installed, completely disable it (uncheck every checkbox in Java Preferences) and give it a few hours.

Also, if you have Xcode installed, simply type "purge" in Terminal and it will free up "Inactive Memory".

edit: I have not purged my memory except once yesterday morning. This is 18hrs. of uptime.

Message was edited by: urabus