Q: Lion - Memory Usage Problems

R C-R imagine if you will thousands of pages here, all filled with people describing this basic phenomenon: upgrade to Lion and Safari 5.1 is consuming what seems to be large amounts of memory, and under normal usage am experiencing slowdowns that had not experienced before, the slowdown is reflected in increased memory usage in Activity Monitor. Would you therein continue to unpack the complexities allocation, purging, consumption, estimation, in what continue to be somewhat interesting, albeit esorteric and ultimately useless posts. To you and everyone else who carries on in that way, what I believe people want are solutions. They want to be able to use their machine in a way their consider normal and not have it slow to a crawl. If you cannot offer them any, why not say that? Is it really meaningful for you to essentially attempt to persuade people that what they see is not reality and to essentially defend what may actually be errors on Apple's part?

babowa wrote:

 

Well, you've been fortunate. As for disk space - or mentioning a "leak" - you do know that there is a new feature called snapshots (part of TM) on laptops - makes continuous backups when not home (home meaning not attached to a TM drive) which will not be wiped until TM catches up. So it could be that is what you're experiencing.

Fortunate or the newer iMac knows (knew before Lion?) how to handle available HD space without throwing me beachballs and turning into a G3 .

The leak or what-ever it might be has to do with Safari and RAM, I think and not HD space available - TM and snapshots work fine on the laptop - Safari doesn't. This is something common on both machines.

Michelasso wrote:

However this is only part of the problem. The supposed memory leak simply exposes what is possibly a bug in the memory management system of Lion. As previously discussed, the fact that by design Lion pages out instead to free [plenty of] inactive memory would be ********.

You can't tell why memory is being paged out, nor if it is freeing up memory that is immediately used by some other process, at least not with tools like Activity Monitor or iStat. If you don't believe that, do your own research. There have been several references in this long thread to the developer documentation from Apple. If that is too complicated to follow, at least check out the Wikipedia entry for memory leak.

All this "supposed" & "possibly" stuff will get you nowhere. Tracking memory management is not easy even for programmers with access to source code. Just guessing about what is happening from tools never designed to show that is futile, at least if you are looking for answers that could solve your memory use issues.

Someone asked why I keep repeating this stuff or if I think it could help. To that I ask, if you don't know what is causing a problem, how do you expect to eliminate it?

Yes, I'm well aware of the Safari problem - one of the reasons I am using Firefox ( also simply prefer it).

I too am seeing Lion using all the RAM...I run Aperture 3 and have 8G of Ram on a MacBook Pro 17in...I keep the "activity monitor" running in my dock and displaying the pie chart for ram usage so I can keep an eye on it...I know Aperture is a memory hog but as you state I noticed Lion has that "web page content" which steals a lot. I did not have this issue before Lion..I do still like Lion, however. I do one of 2 things...when I see the pie chart with little green I open the activity monitor and "end task" on web content and some others I might not be using at the time...I run Parallels which is also a mem hog..

But here is one thing I just started using about a week ago and so far so good...from the App store a free download of ICleanMemory...small app and it seems to be able to find Ram that is not being used and freeing it up...you can have it run up in the top bar and just a click and another click to optimize seems to work well..

I do agree what is Apple thinking...People always talked about the system RAM windows Vista used so whay would Apple not want to avoid the same criticism

Booting at 32bit is working so far.... no memory leaks.

Everyone, please read this link with the 2 posts in that link: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3252430

I noticed that "When Safari 5.1 becomes buggy, page goes blank & spinweel starts, then I noticed in Console it creates a webprocess Spin report" and  "I have noticed also that it creates a WebProcess log almost every minute. Everytime Safari lags and goes white it creates a WebProcess log."

jesslorenzo wrote:

 

Booting at 32bit is working so far.... no memory leaks.

CVD, as i suspected, you give me another confirmation. Which system/memory configuration??

Send a feedback to Apple for this!!

MBP 15'' early 2011, 2.2 Ghz, 8Gig

OS Lion

Running Safari 5.1

Photoshop

MS word

all is well even after 6 hrs.

R C-R wrote:

 

You can't tell why memory is being paged out, nor if it is freeing up memory that is immediately used by some other process, at least not with tools like Activity Monitor or iStat. If you don't believe that, do your own research. There have been several references in this long thread to the developer documentation from Apple. If that is too complicated to follow, at least check out the Wikipedia entry for memory leak.

 

All this "supposed" & "possibly" stuff will get you nowhere. Tracking memory management is not easy even for programmers with access to source code. Just guessing about what is happening from tools never designed to show that is futile, at least if you are looking for answers that could solve your memory use issues.

 

Someone asked why I keep repeating this stuff or if I think it could help. To that I ask, if you don't know what is causing a problem, how do you expect to eliminate it?

That doesn't matter. I am not running an enterprise server. I have only a couple of applications open with well known "standard" resource requirements that in one case (Safari) more than doubles if compared to SL.

As far as the why goes, it is indeed what we are trying to understand. What we suggest is that it shouldn't happen for the simple reason it wasn't happening before and that it has been noticed immediately. As soon as I upgraded to Lion Safari and the paging went crazy and many other people Which to me is more than a reason for Apple to look into its own code if Apple cares about its wn reputation.

Yesterday I also used "leaks", "vmmap" and "vm_stat". These are the tools suggested by Aplle itself. I've got the link straight from the Activity Monitor help page: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Performance/Conceptual/Man agingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001880-BCICIHAB

Safari and WebProcess still using little memory were reported by "leaks" to have some small leaks. But I should try with AdBlock on to see if it reports anything more serious. More interesting has been to run "vm_stat" in my last test. It showed how starting another application (Chrome again) the free memory went down, then up getting pages from the inactive memory and paging out some stuff (only a couple of hundreds MB this time).  Let's say that this time it looked more like a reasonable behaviour. Thus I will need to repeat the test hoping to reproduce the worst case when Lion pages for nothing.

Obviously we don't have the tools to dig what really is going on. And we are not the Apple developers either. But some analysis is better than no analysis at all, isn't it? Especially if we desire to report the issue to Apple. Just denying it doesn't help at all. Simply because Lion in some machines is performing much worse than Windows 7 (not to mention Snow Leopard) doing the same activities. If it doesn't happen to someone it doesn't mean no bug is there either. There are people with more Macs saying that in one Mac Lion runs flawlessly, in another it is a nightmare.

jesslorenzo wrote:

 

Booting at 32bit is working so far.... no memory leaks.

Unfortunately I have a late  2006 MacBook so I am forced by the EFI32 to run all (OS X) kernels at 32 bits and the memory consumption with large page outs it is there. I am pretty sure that is not a stable workaround.

Michelasso wrote:

Unfortunately I have a late  2006 MacBook so I am forced by the EFI32 to run

Micheal, but if you have a 2006 macbook, you have only 2Gb of memory that is not "optimal" for Lion.

So, if with 32bit kernel ad 4Gb to 8Gb the problem is resolved, it's a bug that could be corrected (i prefer to wrote MUST BE, but Apple could say that's a "by design" implementation).

So, we can just wait for 10.7.2.

If anyone has installed the beta update .2 could make some tests for us!

ayrtonoc wrote:

 

Michelasso wrote:

Unfortunately I have a late  2006 MacBook so I am forced by the EFI32 to run

 

Micheal, but if you have a 2006 macbook, you have only 2Gb of memory that is not "optimal" for Lion.

So, if with 32bit kernel ad 4Gb to 8Gb the problem is resolved, it's a bug that could be corrected (i prefer to wrote MUST BE, but Apple could say that's a "by design" implementation).

Nope, 3GB. I know, just above the minimum limit. Still it usually gives me more than 1GB of available memory (free + inactive). It pages out if that GB is mostly inactive memory. I really wonder how a brand new MacBook Air 11" with 2Gb behaves. It seems starnge to me that Apple would sell a system that has just enough resources to run the pre-installed OS.