Massive Mountain Lion memory leak

Buy more ram... 4gb is about the minimal to run the computer alone.

open activity monitor & Terminal from untilities and from Terminal write

$ purge

this will clean your memory so you can run your work

Cleaning the inactive memory will not make FCP X run better. FCP X will use all available ram. 4 gigs is not enough ram to rum the system and FCP X together.

I have had a similar problem with my MBP with 8GB RAM. At a point, I was monitoring 10MBs of free memory, and my computer was becoming almost dead. Once, I quit all applications except Activity Monitor, which was still showing 10Mbs of free RAM, then started quitting background apps like Dropbox, ClipMenu etc. And when I quit Chrono Sync, which is a backup utility, all the inactive memory was free again. 10Mbs, became 5.81 GBs.

Hopefully this wasn't a coincidence, and thanks to all the posts mentioning background running backup utilities.

I had over 70GB of page outs causing my startup disk run out of disk space. Couldn't even do a screen capture it was so full. Does anyone know of an app or command that could identify the offending app that is causing the page outs?

Activity Monitor. In your Utilities folder.

I am based in the UK and have found that there appears to be a contention issue between Safari and the BBC iPlayer.

Once I have closed all applications, the amount of free memory does not recover and the only solution is to reboot.

I have a suspicion that Safari is the culprit here, though I am open to being corrected, so I have stopped using it.

I'm not certain how Activity Monitor will show which application is the culprit since in the BBC iPlayer I would expect data to be written to memory and then to disc, which it does, and for Safari to page files as well. The problem is that an application is not freeing memory once it has been used.

Any suggestions?

Hi William

I am familiar with the Activity Monitor.

Which columns do you suggest I should be monitoring?

Thanks

Lions consume RAM memory very badly.

Lions consume a lot more than Leopard. I tried Lion several times and every time the RAM consumption was extremely more larger than Leopard did. I have A1278 MacBook Pro (2.4 Inter Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR3). With Lions I must continuously monitor how different apps consumes my memory. When all my memory is consumed the Mac slaw down badly. And it is very irritating especially when you know that you don't need to do it in Leopard.

The Leopard is brilliant with RAM consumption.

Eventually I deleted the Lions and installed the Leopard. I'm very disappointed with Lions.

Dropbox is doing a big resyncing on my system, and that appears to be the culprit of massive inactive RAM. I paused it, purged, and everything was okay. Worked for 20min., resumed Dropbox and BANG, inactive RAM maxed out.

Dropbox resync is over, inactive RAM is back to normal.

It's nice to know that someone also suspects that Flash is the culprit. I'm absolutely sure that before upgrading to Lion I had no major issues with Flash. Then, after upgrading (unfortunately, my iMac is not on the "supported" list of hardware for Mountain Lion, so I'm stuck with Lion for now), I noticed that the super-fast Chrome now became a memory and CPU hog. Why? Because once in a while I do, indeed, run some Flash applications — aye, Facebook and YouTube (how can you avoid them these days?), but also others, even my usual short Flash game before going to sleep.

On one old MacBook I tend to use Safari instead of Chrome. But, to be honest, both are as bad in terms of performance. Once in a while, I use Firefox instead. There is no noticeable difference. The real difference between these three browsers is that Chrome spawns one process per tab, while Safari/Firefox spawn threads instead, but, as soon as anything with Flash is loaded, the slowdown is massive on any of those browsers.

Well, I was expecting that it was a Flash problem, and not a Mac OS X problem, so, eventually, after a few updates someone at Adobe would fix that. Apparently, the answer is "no". Since Adobe and Apple are not so good friends any more, it looks like Adobe delights in making Apple users suffer. And probably Apple is powerless to help them. Even Google, which provides its own Flash environment with Chrome, seems to be powerless as well. Whatever is wrong with Flash and Mac OS X persists, even after five minor upgrades (from 10.7.0 to 10.7.5), and who knows how many Flash upgrades.

I've been through a series of posts regarding the memory leaks in Moutain Lion and haven't found a solution to resolve the problem. I have to reboot my comupter (New iMac with 8GB of RAM) daily with a hard boot because Restart doesn't work. The Activity Monitor shows my free memory going down to 29MB or lower no matter what apps I use. It just keeps losing memory as apps are launched. I keep the Activity Monitor and Memory Clean in the Dock because I often don't have enough memory to open folders in the Finder. I routinely Clean Memory (about 20 times a day) but the next day, I still need to reboot my system —EVERY day!

ted

<Edited by Host>

I had a problem with memory leaks for ages, and like many people I thought Mac OS X was the culprit. My free memory would gradually go down to near zero without me starting any programs at which point my Mac would become unresponsive until I either used the purge command or restarted.

However, I was reassured by a Q&A in MacUser magazine that the OS is not at fault, so I sat down today determined to find out what process was causing it. First, I'll say that it was Disk Drill and removing it cleared everything up, but I guess it could in theory be any other program that has been installed on your computer.

First I started in Safe mode (restart and hold down Shift as soon as you hear the startup chime). I switched on Activity Monitor and waited, and the free RAM stayed at about 1GB (of 6). So I could be reasonably sure it was something I had installed that was causing the problem. I took screenshots of the names of all the processes in Activity Monitor (first choose All Processes from the Show pop-up menu, then sort by name, then take as many screenshots as required (Cmd-Shift-4 for crosshairs and drag to create the screenshot).

Next I restarted with normal startup (no modifier keys held down) and opened Activity Monitor. NOTE: it may be better to skip this and go straight to the next paragraph because that could solve the problem quicker). I quit all other open applications including menu-bar apps by using Cmd-Q or left/right-clicking them in the menu bar and choosing Quit/Exit. I opened the screenshots I had taken in Preview. In Activity Monitor I went alphabetically down the list of All Processes, and when I found one that wasn't in my screenshots AND it was owned by me (whatever your username is will show as the user in the column next to the process name), I clicked it and choose Quit Process, and if that didn't work, I clicked it again and chose Force Quit process.

I then opened Console which is in Applications->Utilities. In the left-hand panel I chose 'All Messages' under 'System Log Queries'. I immediately noticed a huge number of errors repeating every few seconds. The errors were something to do with the cfbackd process, which was obviously crashing. I googled the process and discovered it was related to Disk Drill (I had the free version). I found out how to uninstall Disk Drill (you can't just delete the app because it needs to make changes to low-level parts of the OS, but it's very easy). You just open Disk Drill, go to Preferences, General, and Remove Disk Drill. You have to confirm, which was a little unresponsive but worked eventually. Since then, and without needing to restart, my Mac has been as good as new. I thought Disk Drill seemed like an excellent program, but I can live without it for now, and I'm sure the developers will fix the problem (although I haven't personally informed them).

I hope this helps some other people with this problem and reassures them that it is likely not to be Mac OS X that is at fault.

I have investigated what is running when the memory leak starts to get a hold and charted its progress in an effort to find the problem. I do not run Time Machine which potentially causes memory leak problems so that avenue is closed down.

This morning I opened the MacBook Pro, running OS X 10.7.5 with 2.4 GHz i5 and 8 GB of RAM, ran Safari, logged onto the WiFi network, opened Mail and the iTunes. After picking up my mail I refreshed my podcasts which completed successfully. I then noted that performance decreased rapidly and so checked what processes were running and then the Console to check for any errors.

State of the machine from Activity Monitor, the top two processes:

SystemUIServer Memory 5.3 GB CPU 20%-50%

Kernel_task Memory 0.5 GB CPU 20%

Memory usage as follows:

Free: 7.0 MB

Wired: 1.2 GB

Active: 4.5 GB

Inactive: 2.3 GB

Used: 7.99 GB

Vitual memeory used: 184 GB

Swap used: 23 GB

Page ins: 0.6 GB

Page outs: 17 GB

Disc read and write is continuous and 30 GB of disc space has been used in 15 minutes for the VM

Now from the Console I tracked the following:

22/08/2013 11:40:10.420 [0x0-0x45045].com.apple.iTunes: 2013-08-22 11:40:10.419 The plugin 'Quartz Composer Visualizer' failed to load because it has the wrong CPU architecture for this version of iTunes. (3585)

And from that point macx_swapcm and ps_select_segment are active, Emergency paging is switched on, failure to recover emergency paging and the machine is unusable.

The problem seems to lie with iTunes, as I have long expected, though no perhaps Flash player has a part in it when it is running.

I would not expect an OS to allow an Application to run, use all available RAM and then start swapping out to use the hard disc whilst failing to free Inactive memory.

Does Apple have any comments?