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Level 1

25 points

Memory leaks in Lion?

I have a 2008 21-inch iMac, and a 2010 MacBook Pro, both with 4 GB RAM, running OS X Lion 10.7.3. Ever since I installed Lion, I've had this problem of available memory dwindling to almost nothing (10-20 MB) after a day or so of usage. Last night I went to bed and the MacBook Pro had 400 MB available (according to Activity Monitor) and when I woke up this morning it was nearly frozen with only 10 MB available.

I'm not an extreme techie but I've been working in the IT world for over 30 years, including 3 years with Apple, and in my experience this situation is called a Memory Leak. If it were just one of my systems I would suspect something local, but they both behave the same way. (My partner's machine does the same thing.) I've installed the 3rd-party app Memory Freer, which frees up 6-800 GB each time I run it. But as time goes on the memory fills back up again more quickly, and finally I have to reboot.

Checking Activity Monitor, it's not just one app that takes up memory - they all seem to grow over time. (Mail, iPhoto, iTunes, Word, Chrome, etc.) Chrome seems to be the worst offender, with a plethora of Worker and Renderer processes grabbing 10-80 MBs for each open window - and I often leave 10-15 open at any given time. But all apps' memory usage grows over time, even if I haven't accessed them - witness last night's spontaneous bloat on my MacBook.

I've read a couple of other threads on Memory Leaks, but most point to a single app or just suggest Memory Freer. Does Apple know it's got a major league problem here? Are they doing anything about it?

One other point - I get the spinning ball on a lot of tasks, most often with Word and and Excel re-calc, which can last 3-5 seconds, and is another indicator of system overload, even when I've cleared the memory with MemoryFreer and there is supposedly several hundred GB of RAM available. This issue lessens after reboot, but is almost constant with Microsoft Office apps.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 4 GB RAM

Posted on May 31, 2012 4:15 AM

21 replies

Jun 4, 2012 6:35 AM in response to Bobdc6

Bobdc6 wrote:

Here's what I know, with Snow Leopard, my MacBook was faster for a longer period of time. With Lion, I have to purge or restart a couple of times per day. Before Lion, I never used Terminal or purge, now I have to. I have added no new apps. I can't go back to Snow Leopard because I'm using Icloud, so I'm stuck with Lion and purge or restart. It reminds me of Windows defrag problems. The real question is when is Apple going to deal with this problem, or if it's not an Lion problem, reveal to us just what's going on. If I wanted to be a computer hobbyist, I could have stuck with win XP, defrag and scan disk. I'm waiting, Apple!

Did you update to 10.7.4?

The problems you mentioned were very real to me, and they have disappeared after I installed the update.

Bobdc6

Level 1

8 points

Jun 4, 2012 6:47 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Yep, everything is up to date. Thanks.

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Jun 4, 2012 9:07 AM in response to Bobdc6

I have no intention of trouble shooting a problem that started with my downloading Lion

Then you'll probably end up disappointed, since the problem is almost certainly not a bug in Lion. See:

Understanding upgrade nightmares

(Note that my pages contain links to other pages that promote my services, and this should not be taken as an endorsement of my services by Apple.)

LKHill Author

Level 1

25 points

Jun 4, 2012 2:41 PM in response to LKHill

You know guys, I'm just as likely to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, because by and large, their OS is fantastically superior to the crap coming out of Redmond. But when I take two completely different Macs (3 if you count my partner's) and change only the OS release (oh, by the way, and double the memory to 4 GB) and they start to go haywire, I have trouble believing that the issue is some 3rd-party app I'm guilty of installing.

Witness my recent experience with 10.7.4: most of the memory leak issues with both Apple and 3rd party apps dissipated, but now Daylite alone is growing to 1.5 GB from 125 MB in a matter of hours - whether I'm using it or not. I might blame this on Marketsphere being behind the curve on MacOS releases, but clearly something in MacOS memory management has changed yet again. So if Apple can mostly "fix" the problem with 10.7.4, how am I to believe they did not cause it in the first place?!?

Whether you call it a "bug" or a slightly warped memory manager, I expect more of Apple than this mess.

etresoft

Level 8

46,638 points

Jun 4, 2012 4:45 PM in response to LKHill

LKHill wrote:

I have trouble believing that the issue is some 3rd-party app I'm guilty of installing.

...now Daylite alone is growing to 1.5 GB from 125 MB in a matter of hours - whether I'm using it or not. I might blame this on Marketsphere being behind the curve on MacOS releases

Finally!

There are literally thousands of applications that worked fine in Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion with no changes whatsoever. Yet here you have a program which, even after having access to pre-release versions of Lion for months, was unable to get their application to work properly. It isn't suprising that Marketsphere would have trouble with some minor update. This is a sign that they have been and continue to practice poor coding. They are one of those companies that ignores Apple's guidelines for years and only starts working on updates after Apple releases a new operating system version and only then when it breaks. They expect their customers are Daylite customers first and Apple customers second. You don't upgrade until they Daylite tells you to upgrade. That applies to major releases like Lion right down to critical security fixes.

LKHill Author

Level 1

25 points

Jun 4, 2012 8:12 PM in response to etresoft

And this proves that OSX 10.7 didn't actually have a memory management problem? That Daylite's slovenly coding caused the other apps - including Apple's own - to double their memory usage? And it transferred this spell to my home Mac, which doesn't run the program but behaves identically to my work machine? And it somehow remained dormant until the 4th point-release of Lion, just as the other apps stabilized?

I'll agree that Marketcircle took forever and a day to finally announce Release 4, but I doubt their old code corrupted the other apps like a virus...

Memory leaks in Lion?