It started for me only a week or so ago. 30 seconds after I open Preview, my fan starts whirring out of control and I see in Activity Monitor that Preview is using between 97 and 104% of the CPU. Any help? I use Preview all the time for looking at PDFs, &c. and I'd like to be able to keep doing so.
Thanks in advance,
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
Please read this whole message before doing anything.
This procedure is a diagnostic test. It won’t solve your problem. Don’t be disappointed when you find that nothing has changed after you complete it.
The purpose of this exercise is to determine whether the problem is localized to your user account. Enable guest logins and log in as Guest. For instructions, launch the System Preferences application, select “Help” from the menu bar, and enter “Set up a guest account” (without the quotes) in the search box.
While logged in as Guest, you won’t have access to any of your personal files or settings. Applications will behave as if you were running them for the first time. Don’t be alarmed by this; it’s normal. If you need any passwords or other personal data in order to complete the test, memorize, print, or write them down before you begin.
As Guest, launch the application(s) and test. Same problem(s)?
After testing, log out of the guest account and, in your own account, disable it if you wish. Any files you created in the guest account will be deleted automatically when you log out of it.
it looks like the problem is a particular pdf file. when that file is open, the cpu usage goes crazy until the app is closed (just closing the file doesn't help). i haven't tried the file in reader, yet. i created the file on my scanner like 100s of other files that don't cause the problem. so i don't know what is going on. has anyone else noticed something similar or have any ideas of what to look for in the file?
thanks,
There is definitely an undocumented memory usage issue with Preview that Apple should investigate and repair. According to the Activity Monitor on my early 2011 MacBook Pro, Preview was using over 700 MB of memory to view a single small PDF file. When I left Preview minimized in the background, its memory usage steadily increased until my Mac essentially ran out of memory. As you might imagine, the entire system slowed down significantly and started behaving erratically as the amount of available memory decreased.
Anyone else experiencing this problem with Preview? Is Apple aware of this issue?
System specs:
Mac OS X - 10.7.3
4 GB DDR3
2.3 Ghz Intel Core i5
try what Linc advised
Hi, i'll yet have to test what Linc advised but i came here as i encountered the same problem.
Preview can easily take hold of all my free RAM instantly. This is reproducible by opening a PDF (take an epaper magazin for example) magnifying strongly and then swiping around. You can watch the activity monitor at the same time take up all the free RAM (for me thats 1GB out of 4GB at this moment). Naturally, this nearly brings the system to a hold. Something really seems messed up here.
When i use Skim with the same PDFs it never uses more than 100-200MB doing the same kind of actions and is really smooth; the way it should be.
I'm using a MacbookPro13 (Early 2011) with basic Specs.
I use preview to review and annotate large PDF documents. (Typical use case: reviewing and annotating 8-10 separate documents, each ranging in size from 10-600 pages.) I find that Preview's memory footprint increases steadily (according to Activity Monitor). For example, during one session today Preview started at about 400MB of memory and within an hour its memory footprint had grown to 3GB. My normal course of action, once memory pressure gets into the yellow, is to quit Preview and re-start it. I find I have to do this about hourly.
This has been a problem for me for several versions of MacOS.
I'm currently running MacOS 10.11.6; Preview 8.1 (877.7) on a MacBook Air (mid-2011; 4GB memory)
I followed your suggestion above, and logged in as Guest. I accessed several large PDF files, and annotated some of them. Preview's memory footprint increased rapidly from 8MB (clean start) to 1.7GB. However, the memory footprint only increased as I was either paging around in or annotating one or more of the PDF files - it did not consume memory "on its own". This is all consistent with the behavior that I believe I see in my User Account. After closing all of the files, Preview's memory footprint "settled" at 550MB - it didn't return to anything close to the 8MB it starts at. Restarting Preview yielded an 8MB memory footprint.
Thoughts? (I'm inclined to file a bug report, but not sure that I have enough for a developer to go on here.)
Has anyone else noticed a memory leak in Preview?
