A hack for dealing with the fan/temperature issues in Lion

Thank you! 🙂

To remove the hack, just do this:

• Go to System Preferences->Users & Groups.
• Select your user ID, and then click on Login Items
• Select the ReleaseMem.app entry in the Login Items list and then click on "-" (the minus sign) below the list.
• Close System Preferences and restart.

You don't need to delete any of the items that are created. Removing ReleaseMem.app from the Login Items will prevent it from running from now on, after you restart.

And if you ever want to reinstate that program, you can just put it back into the Login Items.

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CORRECTION: in one or more places in my initial post in this thread, I wrote "releasemen", ending with an "n". That should be "releasemem", ending with an "m".

I'm sorry for the typo.

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Thanks again! 🙂

I don't know how to change the title, unfortuately. I think that I can only change the title and the main message of the thread for the first 15 minutes after posting.

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I was too hasty when I wrote the AppleScript that I mentioned above. When doing a "repeat" forever, the system can't be shut down. I apologize for this error.

So now, I have changed the shell script and the AppleScript so that the looping is done within the shell script, and the AppleScript just launches the shell script in the background. This allows the system to shut down with no problem.

The instructions above haven't changed. Just use the following shell script and AppleScript instead of the ones I originally mentioned.

Shell script (now, change both the memory cutoff and the wait interval in this script):

#!/bin/bash

# Number of 4096-byte pages. 50000 is therefore 204,800 MB ...

tooMuchMem=50000

# Wait interval between retries, in seconds ...

waitInterval=60

base="${0##*/}"

lockf=~/var/run/${base}.lock

quit() {

/bin/rm -f ${lockf} 1>/dev/null 2>&1

exit ${1}

}

trap "quit 1" 1 2 3 15

/bin/mkdir -p ~/var/run 1>/dev/null 2>&1

/usr/bin/lockfile -1 -r0 ${lockf} 1>/dev/null 2>&1 || exit 1

while :

do

oldIFS="${IFS}"

IFS=:

/usr/bin/vm_stat 2>/dev/null \

| while read header mem

do

case "${header}" in

Pages\ inactive)

IFS="${oldIFS}"

mem="$(echo "${mem}" | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/\.//g' -e 's/ *//g')"

[[ ${mem} -gt ${tooMuchMem} ]] && {

echo -n "purging due to ${mem} inactive memory blocks > ${tooMuchMem} ..."

/usr/bin/purge

echo " done"

}

break

;;

esac

done

/bin/sleep ${waitInterval}

done

AppleScript (yes, it's only two lines now):

property releasemem : "(" & (POSIX path of (path to home folder)) & "bin/releasemem &) 1>/dev/null 2>&1"

do shell scriptreleasemem

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Thank you! 🙂

Yes, I agree that launchd is better. I'm in the process of porting this to launchd, and I'll post my results here soon.

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I've now come up with a launchd-based solution for this. It's a lot cleaner than using AppleScript for starting the shell script.

Here's what to do ...

First, disable the Login Item for ReleaseMem.app as I described a few messages above.

Then, change the releasemem script, above, to look like this. As always, it's best to copy and paste:

#!/bin/bash

[[ $# -lt 1 ]] && exit 1

tooMuchMem="${1}"

shift

/bin/mkdir -p ~/var/run 1>/dev/null 2>&1

base="${0##*/}"

lockf=~/var/run/${base}.lock

quit() {

/bin/rm -f ${lockf}

exit ${1}

}

trap "quit 1" 1 2 3 15

/usr/bin/lockfile -1 -r0 ${lockf} 1>/dev/null 2>&1 || exit 1

oldIFS="${IFS}"

IFS=:

/usr/bin/vm_stat 2>/dev/null \

| while read header mem

do

case "${header}" in

Pages\ inactive)

IFS="${oldIFS}"

mem="$(echo "${mem}" | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/\.//g' -e 's/ *//g')"

[[ ${mem} -gt ${tooMuchMem} ]] && {

echo -n "purging due to ${mem} inactive memory blocks > ${tooMuchMem} ..."

/usr/bin/purge

echo " done"

}

break

;;

esac

done 2>/dev/null

quit 0

Open up Finder to your home folder.

Hold down the Option key and then click on the Go item in the Finder menu bar. While still holding down the Option key, select Library.

Create a sub-folder called LaunchAgents in this Library sub-folder, if one doesn't already exist.

Open up Text Edit and select File->New. Then, select Format->Make Plain Text.

Copy and paste this text into the Text Edit window:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>Label</key>

<string>XXX.releasemem</string>

<key>ProgramArguments</key>

<array>

<string>/Users/LLL/bin/releasemem</string>

<string>50000</string>

</array>

<key>StartInterval</key>

<integer>60</integer>

<key>StandardInPath</key>

<string>/dev/null</string>

<key>StandardOutPath</key>

<string>/dev/null</string>

<key>StandardErrorPath</key>

<string>/dev/null</string>

</dict>

</plist>

In this text, change the string XXX (in XXX.releasemem) to a dot-separated name that looks like a reverse domain name. For example, Apple uses com.apple (the reverse of the apple.com domain name). Pick something personal -- not anything like com.apple, com.google, etc. For this example, I'll use com.testorama. Therefore, in this example, the XXX.releasemem string will become com.testorama.releasemem.

In the text, change the string LLL (in /Users/LLL/bin/releasemem) to the login ID that you use when signing in to your Mac. For example, if your login ID is quack, then /Users/LLL/bin/releasemem will become /Users/quack/bin/releasemem.

You can also change the 50000 string and the 60 string if you want to modify the maximum number of 4096-byte Inactive memory blocks or the number of seconds between memory checks.

Select File->Save...

In the save dialog box, navigate to the Library sub-folder under your home folder, and then to the LaunchAgents sub-folder within Library.

Type XXX.releasemen.plist in the Save As box, where XXX is defined as above. In this example, the file name would be com.testorama.releasemem.plist.

Select Unicode (UTF-8) in the Plain Text Encoding box.

Un-check If no extension is provided, use ".txt".

Click Save and then quit from Text Edit.

Open the Terminal application.

Type these two commands, each followed by hitting the Return key. It's best if you copy and paste them one by one, each one followed by the Return key:

cd ~/Library/LaunchAgents

launchctl load -F XXX.releasemem.plist

XXX should be the same as above. In our example, the second command will be launchctl load -F com.testorama.relasemem.plist

That's it. Now, the releasemem command will run every 60 seconds (or whatever you specified in the plist file), and it will purge Inactive memory whenever it reaches the specified limit.

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John Hammer1 wrote:

With all due respect, which I mean sincerely, no one with less than your own understanding of the OS should do this. Copy/Pasters are just going to get themselves in trouble.

I understand that this is complicated. However, I tried hard to make it as clear and foolproof as possible by going step by step instead of simply posting something like ...

• Create the following executable shell script in ~/bin ... etc. ...
• Create and load the following LaunchAgent plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents ... etc. ...

That two-step procedure would be sufficient for some fairly experienced MacOSX programmers, but I wanted to spell things out in detail in order to try to help those who are not familiar with this kind of MacOSX programming.

I realize that what I wrote might still be daunting for many people, but I can't think of a better way to describe this procedure for those who might need some help.

In any case, if you think this can help you, then feel free to try it and to ask questions here if it doesn't seem to work.

If you feel it's too complicated, then don't try it.

But I agree with Redarm: if something goes wrong when you are trying to follow these steps, the worst that will happen is nothing.

Some day when I have enough spare time (but don't hold your breath!), I'll come up with a disk image that will install this hack. That will be much easier for most people.

Or if any of you are ambitious, feel free to create such a disk image ... or any other tools or procedures that might make this hack easier for people to install.

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