iTunes memory consumption, can't save, crashes etc.

I'd just conducted a number of tests to determine why iTunes keeps running out of memory, resulting in failure to save library, hangs, and crashes. This became end

emic with me over the last few months for me.

in this case, I'm using 11.2.2.3 on Windows 64, having recently downloaded/reinstalled 64 bit itunes, which as we know is still a 32 bit app.

All problems arise when iTunes grows to around 1.5G of memory, which is near the limit for a 32 bit app, and so not a problem on OS-X, which has real 64-bit applications.

I went through the exercise of deleting a bunch of my music library and deleting a bunch of podcasts and found the following.

(1) music in the library isn't the issue;

(2) on deleting a bunch of podcasts, I could sync my iphone, and ended with an itunes of about 1.3G in size.

(3) restarting itunes left it at around 60M in size.

(4) attaching my phone and letting it sync took it to around 300M in size.

(5) refreshing podcasts blew it up to 1.3G

(6) restarting itunes with phone disconnected took it to 60M again;

(7) refreshing podcasts took it to 1.3G again.

It would appear the in-memory representation of podcast catalog listings in itunes is very memory inefficient, and that subscribing to many podcasts with many episodes will consume memory until it explodes.

I subscribe to around 30 podcasts, but some of them have very many episodes in the catalog. I suppose the reason I started running into this is because the number of back-episodes recently grew past what could be contained in the 32-bit application.

This seems like a mis-feature, requiring re-design of something to be more space-efficient. It's probably not a simple leak, is very problematic on windows, and not going to apply to OS-X (though it will waste memory there too).

The only workaround I can think of is to not subscribe to long-running, popular podcasts, which doesn't seem like an answer, really.