Q: Lion - Memory Usage Problems

On my system I have 16GB.  This morning I came in and the 'Dock' process had 8.97GB.  I did a "killall Dock' and it freed everything.  Now everything is working great again.  This is a weekly occurance, sometimes more than once.

Roque

Ah, this would make sense as I started noticing exhaustion of Free and a buildup of Inactive when I upgraded to Lion and started using VMWare (bless VMWare 4.1.0 for the 'bug' of allowing OS X 10.5 and 10.6 Client to be virtualized )

Note: I found that when I run vmmap on certain processes the machine will pretty much lock up and beach ball, most notably on the Sophos A/V processes

When I am asked to solve any problems on someone's Mac for them, the first thing I check is for any AV software. If I find any, I immediately uninstall it. This more often then now solves the problem right there.

AV software on a Mac is good for only one thing and that is causing problems.

Allan

Hopefully the situation won't change and AV software will become a necessary on Macs too.  For now I agree the benefits one might get from AV on a Mac is far outweighed by the problems they tend to cause.

Ever since switching to Lion I've been having a lot of problems with memory getting eaten up mysteriously. I took a screenshots of activity monitor showing that after a full day of work, and after closing all open applications, I have 1 GB of active memory missing. Lion is definitely leaking memory throughout the day and the only way to prevent the system paging out memory is to restart.

http://i.imgur.com/ohBEF.png

I don't understand what you mean about memory being missing. Could you explain more about that?

Allan Eckert wrote:

 

AV software on a Mac is good for only one thing and that is causing problems.

You might as well say Adobe software is only good for the same thing.

I was going to save that for another day.

Allan

RCR, if you look at the image, you'll see that at the end of the day, "active memory" is over 1.7 GB, even though the apps running in activity monitor consume roughly the same as the beginning of the day when there is only 600 MB of active memory being used. That's 1 GB that the system simply cannot account for and never releases back.

thanks for you're answer and research.

i'm using chrome and firefox, they consume less memory.

but...in safari i have all my bookmarks and passwords so...sometimes i check to see if the problem is solved...

When I re-kicked off this thread a few months back it was because of exactly what SeanChristmann is describing plus it was also happening rapidly. In 2 minutes I would lose 7 GB of memory. Once I stopped using Safari the rapid consumption of memory stopped (mostly.)  However, as SeanChristmass has articulated very clearly - I still have a lot of missing memory. Mine is often "inactive" memory - Active Monitor will graphically report 5 GB of inactive memory being used and 3 GB of other types. When I look at the list of items being consumed in inactive memory I can only see ~ 1.5 GB consumed. I then close all applications so active memory now only displays Finder as active and yet inactive memory is still at 4.5 GB but I can't see the items in the list.  I then shut down and it repairs itself.

As this is my first time in the Apple MacBook world I worked endlessly with the Business Team at the Boston store. They even replaced my new machine a few times because it was confusing to them too. Finally they concluded I should stop using Safari and then just shut down periodically.

Honestly, all this makes me miss Windows 7 ... I just wish this Macbook wasn't so darn pretty.

Have you ever had any problem with your computer not working because of the inactive memory?  Inactive memory just means that the RAM holds the last used programs and files when shutdown in RAM as inactive.  Its a feature not a bug.  This is usually because people often use the same programs daily and so if held in ram, they open faster.  However, Inactive memory releases and frees this  memory when and as needed by "active" memory. So again, are you basically alarmed because you see this blooming of inactive memory, OR has this actually caused system slowdown or malfunction?

I would like to agree with you. But here is most common (for me) problem - inactive memory usage is constantly growing, to the point that system start using swap file. At some point I can have all free memory depleted, a lot of inactive memory and a several gbs of swap space used, that all with strictly said the same set of openned applications, which if openned after reboot would left around 1 a gb free.

And I do not use any AV software.

SeanChristmann wrote:

 

RCR, if you look at the image, you'll see that at the end of the day, "active memory" is over 1.7 GB, even though the apps running in activity monitor consume roughly the same as the beginning of the day when there is only 600 MB of active memory being used. That's 1 GB that the system simply cannot account for and never releases back.

Keep in mind that Activity Monitor does not show you a breakdown of how much active memory each process is using, just a total for all processes (real memory is not the same as active memory). Also note that at the beginning of the day (IOW, after startup & log in) not every running process is active. In fact, some background processes become active only when other processes are not, or in response to the activity of other processes. Some processes may not become active at all unless you perform some action that triggers that, & once triggered may not become completely inactive until much later.

Plus, Activity Monitor samples memory use at relatively long intervals compared to how quickly active memory can be reallocated among running processes so even though the total shown isn't changing from sample to sample, which processes are using it can change greatly between samples.

So basically, the amount of active memory shown by AM at the start of the day isn't a very good benchmark for comparisons with how it is used at any later time.