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RAM issues - printtool is out of hand

I've been noticing issues with my memory. Activity monitor shows the 'printtool' process to be taking up a huge chunk of RAM. Right now it's at 800+ MB, for no good reason. (I'm not printing anything.) The process takes up more and more RAM until I kill it. Killing it works temporarily, but it always comes back. I'm looking for a permanent solution.


The parent process is launchd, and this process will run indefinitely until I stop it. I've seen it exceed 1GB of memory before. I've got 4GB in total, Macbook Pro late 2008. I've seen the problem in Snow Leopard as well as in Lion, though it did seem to go away for a while before cropping up again recently.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Sep 16, 2011 1:42 AM

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51 replies

Nov 12, 2011 10:07 AM in response to bobtea

I seem to be having the same issue. Printtool grew to over 4GB in size before I killed its process. I noticed it emediately began to re-run in Activity Monitor at a pace of .5MB/Min. This is rediculous. It seems to be associated with PrintCore and its Parent process is launchd. I would like help, if possible, to stop.remove this memory leak.

Nov 30, 2011 10:42 AM in response to bobtea

I'm having the exact same issue as everyone else. After being away from the office for nearly a week due to the holiday, when I logged in to my Mac Mini (w/8GB total system memory), I noticed that I had less than 1GB free while running no applications whatsoever! Ridiculous! So I launched Activity Monitor and noticed that the "printtool" process was hogging 2.4GB of system memory. When I killed the printtool process it relaunches using 2.5MB, but then steadily increases at a rate of about 0.5MB per minute. This is a very serious memory leak and Apple needs to get this fixed ASAP.

Jan 26, 2012 5:32 AM in response to archm62

Note to Apple... Please fix.

You are only talking to Mac users in this forum. If you wish to tell Apple, you call customer support or use one of these channels


BugReporter

<http://bugreporter.apple.com>

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Anyone can get a free account at:

<http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/>


And/Or


Feb 8, 2012 4:18 PM in response to bobtea

+1 for me, exactely the same symptoms.


Activity Monitor shows that printtool is taking 50% of CPU all the time, iMac 24' early 2009, newly updated to latest version of Lion (from latest before of course) last week (early Feb 2012 update).


Killing process makes it relaunch seconds after, memory occupation growing until the iMac is ULTRA SLOW.... Like it takes secondssss just to see launchpad or close program or change from one window to another.

RAM issues - printtool is out of hand

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