Q: Lion - Memory Usage Problems
-
Jan 4, 2012 10:58 PMby William Kucharski,All such utilities do is flush all the system buffer caches, meaning the next time your computer needs data formerly held in RAM, it needs to fetch it from disk instead.
This article gives great background on this.
-
Jan 5, 2012 7:52 AMby Allan Eckert,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
-
Jan 5, 2012 9:50 AMby louis258,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.
-
Jan 6, 2012 11:59 AMby BlackNova,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.
-
Jan 6, 2012 12:05 PMby Roque Solis,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.
-
Jan 6, 2012 1:46 PMby BlackNova,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.
-
Jan 6, 2012 4:03 PMby Joel Bruner1,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
-
Jan 10, 2012 11:07 AMby gbullman,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.
