Bought a new MacBook Pro Retina 15, 8mb ram. Recently when running Mail, it refuses to close when I quit the application. Worse, I get a window (screenshot attached) saying that I have no more space for running applications on my startup disk, even though just running Mail and Firefox. Any suggestions?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)
Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.
In the Activity Monitor application, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.
Your problem is excessive swapping of data between physical memory and virtual memory.
That can happen for two reasons:
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.
In the Activity Monitor application, select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more memory over time without ever releasing it.
The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.
Try closing Mail and see if you get that message.
I found a bug in Mountain Lion that makes Mail consume more and more memory when you read a mail there, making your computer slow if you read a lot. I would like to know if it's similar to your case. Also, when you have Mail opened, open "Activity Monitor" (it's in /Applications/Utilities) and have a look at the memory that Mail takes
Hi, Thanks for reply. Often try to quite Mail but it just hangs at that point. Had earlier looked at Activity Monitor and about 80% of the CPU was being used by something, but it was not apparent by what. weird. Mail would dramatically spike periodically in the monitor, but was not consistently eating up more than 25% of the cpu. Looks to me like a bug/problem with Mail.
Hi Linc,
Thanks! I'm not sure how much each of the applications should be using to know if there is a leak. Here is a screenshot of the real mem list. Anything look suspicious? Is there anything I can do to resolve a leak issue?
Are you getting the warnings now?
You were absolutely correct. Firefox kept adding and adding Real Mem, while open, even though I was not browsing. I eventually received the notice. Closing Firefox and using either Safari or Chrome solved the problem. How do I deal with the "leak" in Firefox. Should I trash my copy and download another one?
In any case, thanks. Very helpful.
I don't know much about Firefox. In the case of Safari, memory leaks are sometimes triggered by extensions. The analogous items in Firefox are called "add-ons." You could try removing those and see whether there's an improvement. If not, go to the Firefox support forum.
I have the same problem with mail. Every new message I read causes an increase in the real mem. value shown by Activity Monitor. Quiting mail and restarting it fixs the problem --- for awhile. This is on Mail 6.6 and OS 10.8.5
No space on startup disk? Problem with Mail?
