Yosemite OS 10.10 Mail Memory Leak

So, I've been dealing with this for one full day now. I wrapped up work at about 6PM, ate dinner, watched some baseball, and have just returned to my Mac to find I have less than 40 MB of free memory available and I have ZERO applications open (other than Dropbox, Memory Clean and Creative Cloud -- which have never caused any problems in the past). I do not know how to troubleshoot this. I had a span of luck with Mail.app today not running out of memory (probably because I kept closing it and relying on iPhone or webmail access). Lastly, I just have to say how much I appreciate the comments in this thread. I have the worst luck in these forums of people with nothing better to do than flame and mock users who are genuinely seeking help.

FYI, I just ran Memory Clean and am back up to 2.53 GB but still, where is the remaining 5.5 GB going?

Here, is this anything?

So odd...

Thanks

Correct, holding down the Shift key when launching Mail will not fix this issue because it's for doing something else entirely. If it has stopped your issue then my guess is that it's just irony.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4066

Mail: Mail unexpectedly quits when viewing certain messages

“Open Mail and immediately hold the Shift key until Mail completely launches. This will cause Mail to launch without any Mail message or mailbox selected.”

Unfortunately it probably has nothing to do with this issue, sorry to report.

http://www.macinside.info/process.php?name=installd

What is “installd”?

"installd" is a system process that stands for Install Daemon. It tends to run in the background when you're installing an app from the App Store or installing a software update.

I am having the same issues. I have not had them in the past and am using the same system 2013 MBP Retina w/16gb of memory. This really needs to be fixes. This is my work system and I am having to constantly close my office apps to free up memory

Add me to this as well. My MBP is fine but my wife brought her's home with Mail using 48GB of memory. I killed all the apps, rebooted and everything was fine for a couple of hours then back up again. BTW I noticed in activity monitor that after a reboot her 4GB RAM machine had 3GB of RAM used with no applications open at all. Something is not right.

I am having this memory issue with Chrome and Mail. Mail was up to 43gb. Chrome was at 22. This is a major issue apple needs to address quickly.

Allan,

Towards the end of the workday yesterday, I shift-started mail and did a Rebuild of the mailbox. I had to leave soon after. As of this morning, the memory leak has not yet recurred. Keeping fingers crossed.

Cheers, Ian

Ian, thanks for your post.

I just tried this this morning. I had no other applications open at all. I shift-started Mail.app, and then initiated a Rebuild (I only have 1 mail account setup in Mail.app), and nothing happened, everything went blank (so I checked the connection (good) and then I just clicked on "Sent", and then back to "Inbox" and all my mail showed up...so, just an odd bug there and a heads-up if anyone tries this and that happens.)

However,

I quickly realized that my memory dropped to 27 MB. So I closed Mail.app. Did a Memory Clean, and now I'm back up to 2.95 GB with ONLY Chrome running. I have 8 GB of memory on this system and since upgrading to Yosemite it has not had more than 4.5 GB free (typically hovering between 1 and 2 GB free). I know 8 GB of memory isn't a "monster system" but honestly, I've never had problems with this iMac EVERRRR. I run 3 or 4 Adobe applications simultaneously, with Mail.app, and Chrome, Spotify, and all the background apps and I've been doing this for 4 years and I've never even experienced slow down...now this.

So, this weekend, I'm going to try and Clean Install. A friend of mine is just raving about how great and fast Yosemite is and how he has no problems whatsoever on his Macbook Pro (but, he did a clean install.)

A couple of good Clean Install related articles:

1. http://osxdaily.com/2014/10/18/clean-install-os-x-yosemite/
2. http://osxdaily.com/2014/10/16/make-os-x-yosemite-boot-install-drive/

same issue here, with ONLY mail running, after about 15 minutes I get this error message

The same issue has happened to me 3 times this morning already. Seems to be happening when I am drafting a message and then start multitasking away from Mac Mail. Memory shoots up to 10G, 12G, up and up and up. So I continue to have to quit Mac Mail and start again.

Has anyone spoken with Apple Care about this? Has anyone heard from Apple about this issue? Thank you.

Chrome too? Very interesting. Anybody else having chrome issues?

I also noticed something that happens every time the memory skyrockets:

I have my Activity window open in the Mail.app and every line/folder in that window that it's attempting to sync with, they all freeze with solid blue progress bars and then the memory goes out of control.

Has anyone else noticed that behavior as well?

I have one iCloud account & one GoDaddy IMAP account. What do others have?

I have also been having issues with Chrome, namely in the Activity Monitor multiple (anywhere from 3 to 6) "Chrome Helper (Not Responding)" processes hogging ~ 150 MB each.

There is an article about it here that has helped alleviate that for now, I think it's working (but at somewhat of a cost, I now have to allow everything (Flash and other plugins) to load with a mouse click).

I have just too many apps to think about a clean install. And I've found that many developer houses are slower to achieve compatibility of their installers with a new OS than they are with their applications. So be careful. Just because, say, some old version of MS Word works with the new OS doesn't mean you'll find that the installer does. If you have access to a virtual processor, like Parallels or VMWare, and the time, do a clean build on that and then try to install your apps.

Better safe than sorry.

As to the safe start for Mail, I'm not sure why this worked. I've looked over the error and other logs in my Library folder for Mail. There doesn't seem to be anything different from before or after the point in time when I did the safe start in terms of different network or termination errors. I did have one message open that I was attempting to work on in order to send, and the name of that message comes up in the error logs. It was something that I was trying to work on as the first message I would send out after the upgrade. I began it the first time I opened Mail after the upgrade and it was slow as ****. So I stopped bothering and left that window open overnight. It was still slow as molasses the following morning. That's when I started checking what was hacking at the disk. I figured it would be the usual culprit, mdworker; but no. That message had no attachments and just a few lines of text. It was going out through an IMAP service on GoDaddy. However, each time I re-opened the Mail app, this message would also re-open as saved work. It is possible, I guess, that Mail had some issue with the first message and that the safe start certainly avoided reopening that message. However, once I got Mail going again, I just pulled it out of drafts and finished it off and sent it without any further problems.

So I guess here's a followup question to those who are having this problem with Mail. Are you working on a message that re-opens whenever Mail does?

Maybe find and kill that first out-going message?