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Level 1

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Massive Mountain Lion memory leak

I will start describing the problem where I first discovered it.

My early 2011 MBP had been asleep, and upon opening and waking it, it was incredibly slow. I opened activity monitor and couldn't believe my eyes.

I have 8 GB of RAM, and all but 8 mb was in use. Around 6 GB was "inactive". I had no applications running besides Activity Monitor.

I opened terminal and ran the purge command After a short wait, total memory usage was back to around 2 GB. Then right before my eyes, over approximately 30 seconds, the "inactive" memory grew until once again, I had about 8 mb of RAM free. This fluctuated a few mb, but nothing significant.

After rebooting, I opened Activity monitor again, to watch ram usage. Usage increased to a little more than 2 GB. I then launched the App Store. Before putting my laptop to sleep earlier, I had been downloading a 10 GB update to Borderlands, but had paused the download, and quit the application before closing the laptop. I hit resume download, and went back to Activity Monitor. Memory usage seemed normal for several seconds, but shortly started increasing rapidly again. I imediately hit "pause download" in the App Store. But ram usage continued rising, so I quit the application. It kept rising, until my full 8 GB was in use.

At this point I took a screenshot:

The only thing I have left to tell you is that before upgrading to ML, I had previously attempted to download the same update, but hadn't had time to download the full 10 GB, so had cancelled the update. That was in Lion 10.7.4, with 4 GB of RAM, and I had no issues.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 6:17 PM

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,559 points

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 6:53 PM

Your screenshot shows nothing abnormal. Having a lot of inactive memory simply means that it's been used and released. If you're curious as to what was using it, you'll have to look at All Processes, not My Processes.

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120 replies

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 9:50 AM in response to Scott Newman

I have 8GB of Ram, my useage is consistent at about 5.5GB. (This is consistent behaviour on all 5 Macs that I use)

If I only had 4GB and my useage stayed the same I would be swapping constantly. Swapping is much slower than operating from physical Ram.

So I invested in enough Ram for my useage. (And i do not allow Google's apps anywhere near the machine)

Sep 13, 2013 9:52 AM in response to Scott Newman

Scott Newman

>>I have a mid-2011 13-inch MacBook air with a 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD.

How much page ins and page outs do you have?

>>I do monitor free RAM and pageouts and almost never have any pagouts.

top

...

VM: 304G vsize, 1284M framework vsize, 2800085(0) pageins, 339726(0) pageouts.

...

If compare to page ins I have only 12% page outs. I don't think it's a big value.

The questions are "

Why there is such huge amount of inactive memory?

Why my macbook lag when the inactive memory squeezing out the free memory?

Why, it's inactive. It must be released.

Sep 13, 2013 10:02 AM in response to sergibondarenko

Two processes only: Google Maps and GoogleDocs/GoogleDrive.

Your experience may be different. Mine is that with a number of tabs opened to REAL web pages, Google Chrome uses much more RAM that does Safari or Firefox. And, in my experience, Safari is also a RAM hog. That's why my most-used browser is Firefox.

Sep 13, 2013 10:06 AM in response to Csound1

Csound1

>>And i do not allow Google's apps anywhere near the machine

You use iTunes, AppStore, iCloud etc. You send you data to Apple instead of Google. Not big difference.

Sep 13, 2013 10:07 AM in response to Scott Newman

Scott Newman

How much page ins and page outs do you have?

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 10:08 AM in response to sergibondarenko

sergibondarenko wrote:

Csound1

>>And i do not allow Google's apps anywhere near the machine

You use iTunes, AppStore, iCloud etc. You send you data to Apple instead of Google. Not big difference.

Can you manage to stick to the point even for a moment.

What does that have to do with inactive memory?

Googles apps are awful, use them if you want.

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 10:10 AM in response to sergibondarenko

sergibondarenko wrote:

Scott Newman

How much page ins and page outs do you have?

Please explain what Page ins have to do with this. Page ins occur when you open anything, Page outs occur when your physical Ram is used up and you keep on opening things.

You do understand how this works, don't you?

Sep 13, 2013 10:16 AM in response to Csound1

Scott Newman wrote "The secret is not to have a lot pageouts."

Now I wont to comapare my page outs to his page outs.

I have the same amount of RAM - 4GB.

>>Page outs occur when your physical Ram is used up and you keep on opening things.

I understand.

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 10:19 AM in response to sergibondarenko

I asked you what Page Ins have to do with this issue, why didn't you answer that.

Please explain what Page ins have to do with this.

Sep 13, 2013 10:24 AM in response to Csound1

Scott Newman wrote "The SECRET is not to have a lot pageouts."

Now I would like to find out if I missed something. I want to know the SECRET.

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 10:29 AM in response to sergibondarenko

The 'Secret' to reducing pageouts is to Use less Ram, or Install more Ram.

It's simple, and not very 'Secret'

Sep 13, 2013 10:37 AM in response to Csound1

I would like to calculate the percentage of page outs to page ins. Using the formula

x=100*po/pi

Thus we can compare our systems.

I have 12% pi compare to po.

I would like to know if he really has solved the problem or just have masqueraded it by his SSD.

Sep 13, 2013 10:37 AM in response to imclerran

I found that a try to resolve the memory management problem in this forum leads to nowhere. After tons of tons of discussions (or debates probably), one group of people keep saying that OSX is perfect and the performance slowdown is due to some st*pidness of the users or their self-created confusion, while the other group keeps complaining the terrible performance that a 2K dollar macbook should not produce. I'll not post any further discussion on this topic, and save my previous time which has been already wasted a lot by seeing that rotating little rainbow hopelessly.

BTW, if you can't bear with the paging ins and outs, open your terminal and execute "purge". It's a bad solution indeed, but it helps sometimes.

Csound1

Level 9

59,985 points

Sep 13, 2013 10:40 AM in response to sergibondarenko

My pageout is at 0, it is always at 0 because I have enough Ram to keep it that way

So do your calculation based on my having no pageouts at all.

Pageins have nothing to do with this, that's data going from disk to Ram)

Sep 13, 2013 10:40 AM in response to dalibocai

dalibocai

In OS X 10.8 "purge" is my friend. I run it several times per day.

Massive Mountain Lion memory leak