Preview 8 is taking up heaps of RAM

I'm experiencing the same issue, Preview consumes over 1Gb or RAM easily when a PDF is open. Not too hopeful I decided to try Acrobat, to my surprise it uses 75% less RAM...Yay!!

I've tested and after a couple of hours, RAM usage actually decreased. Acrobats RAM usage with the same 3 PDFs is now around 255 MB.

It doesn't beat Preview 7 on Mavericks, but at least you can now get this RAM hog off your back until it's "resolved".

I have not noticed this RAM problem but have had tremendous difficulty in opening a pdf (168.9 MB in size). In fact 99% of the time Preview (V8) does nothing and all I can do is "force quit" the app.

Have spoken to Apple on 2 occasions about this difficulty and even restored the system without any success.Tried opening the same pdf on my brothers iMac running Mavericks (10.9) and Preview(V7) worked almost instantly.

I should say that Adobe Reader opened same pdf straight away although I do prefer Preview or at least did!!

What Apple helped me do was to re-install Preview (V7) from my brothers system (having previously given it to me ) but it wouldn't work but we overcame the problem by changing Preview(V7) to Previews (V7) - a subtle change but at least it did work and now have two versions of the app on my iMac.

You might like to consider this alternative.

Quit Preview.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Remove the following.

Containers/com.apple.Preview

Preferences/com.apple.Preview.LSSharedFileList.plist

Preferences/com.apple.Preview.SandboxedPersistentURLs.LSSharedFileList.plist

Saved Application State/com.apple.Preview.savedState

Credit Linc Davis for this solution.

Hi ribbo39,

I do prefer Preview as well since I also use it to view basic jpg's. Is there any chance you could PM me v7?

Thanks!

Hi Eric Root,

Thanks for your suggestion. I tried it, unfortunately it only helped temporarily. After a few hours Preview's RAM usage was back up to 1.6Gb w/ just one PDF open 😟 So it seems that I'll have to keep using Acrobat until Apple releases updates Preview which they only seem to do on every mayor software update, OSX Joshua Tree 10.11?

Well, what is the size of the one PDF that you have open?

Just 8mb, lol

To Sebasll,

I'm unable to email you the Preview 7 app. Do you have a backup such as Time Machine? If so you could try using that version 7 app and make it Previews
before installing it on your iMac.

The older version works very well in opening a pdf of 169.mb whereas the version 8 just freezes up and requires a force quit all the time.

The suggestions put forward by Eric Root had no effect at all and this was done inconjunction with Apple Techs when I first raised the problem.

I should add that the same pdf opend almost immediately using Adobe Reader and does so with the earlier preview version.

In looking at my activity monitor Preview 8 takes is taking 254mb and is continually rising (but Not responding) in try to open the same 169mb pdf

at time of writing.

I use Preview and it uses very little memory so not sure why some people have the issue.

I do have and still use Preview 8 but it appears to only want to work with smaller pdf's - like single pages or much smaller files.

Preview 8 flatly refuses to open my 169 mb pdf whereas v7. opens it almost immediately.

Its a mystery why but at least Apple were able to get me up & running without having to use Adobe - no problem myself but just

a preferance I have.

In general there is not much of a relation to the actual size of PDF file on the disk compared with how much memory it will take to display that PDF on the screen (except that larger PDF disk files will USUALLY result in larger memory needs in Preview but it depends on what is in the PDF files (ie lots of images or lots of text or ???).

PDF files use compression to save space but it sure seems like that the version 8 Preview has some serious memory leak problems that make using it impractical for certain PDF files.

So - hint - hint - wink - wink - APPLE GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER AND FIX THE MEMORY LEAK IN PREVIEW.

Ironically, the PDF rendering performance improvement is touted in El Capitan. Meanwhile, the memory leak problem of Preview still exists! I once have a 100MB PDF file that caused Preview to use up 8GB RAM!!

Try this: Preview app using lots of RAM