Guide: How to solve Yosemite memory leaks and CPU usage

Thanks for this guide. Followed all the steps exactly but my Mail app is still showing about 100% CPU usage in activity monitor. Curiously, before I followed your steps the fans were going into overdrive when I had Mail open but now are pretty quiet.

Solution didn't work for me.

Late 2011 MBP with 8GB RAM. It's consistently using 7.9-odd GB and slows to a crawl with more than a couple of apps open. Anything beefy like Aperture or Logic freezes the thing up completely.

Generally, no one app seems to be using crazy amounts of RAM, though I am seeing a lot of crashed/unresponsive system processes, Safari tabs, etc.

Luis' solution may improve some functions of the OS, but it does not solve the Mac Mail leak problem.

This is definitely a bug in the Mail code somewhere, affecting (at least) some configurations of Yosemite installs. My Mac Mail app is un-useable at this point. It starts leaking memory just by opening it. Within a minute or so it is using up 33GB of memory.

To be sure, I ran through the safe mode/smc/PRAM steps listed on my MacBook Pro. Mail's memory leak problem remains.

It has been released 10.10.1 beta, has anyone checked if it addresses these issues?

I'm set to receive beta updates but not seeing this one yet. Will try and report if/when it shows up.

i had to re-download and install the seed configuration utility to see the beta

That occurred to me too, but still no dice.

A friend of mine insists on LibreOffice as cause for all that trouble. He thinks that the fonts of LibreOffice interfere with the Apple-ones and lead to something like stack-overflow.

Possible??

(I love the formula-editor of LO, since nothing compares to it. (simply writing the expressions instead of click-click-click). Latex is a bit too special for my purposes.)

monostone wrote:

A friend of mine insists on LibreOffice as cause for all that trouble. He thinks that the fonts of LibreOffice interfere with the Apple-ones and lead to something like stack-overflow.

Interesting thought. Open up Font Book and see what conflicts / duplicates you can find.

My mail app (8.0 Yosemite) was showing >100% usage on my core 2 duo MacBook, even when not touching any mail servers.

Followed the instructions, and after the usual flurry of activity on the last boot, the system settled down nicely to what I consider "normal" activity levels, even when checking mail. It give all appearance of working and I will keep a close eye on it over the next 24 hours or so.

Thanks for posting clear instructions.

This works for me !!

MacBook Pro 15"

So I think I found the windowserver issue. I tried all of the other tricks - Disabling transparency, only using one display, forcing discrete graphics, resetting the SMC and PRAM. All of that seemed to chip away a bit, but no matter what, this kept creeping back. My usage pattern typically is heavy on browser and terminal windows.... so I'm not doing anything too crazy.

Find anything that has a tray icon in the upper right, and kill it. Seriously, everything - Unless it came from apple itself, it's suspect, and even then, kill it if you don't need it.

My brother printer has a app that mandates a tray icon I tended to actually use because I could scan directly from the printer - a bit silly, i know, but handy when you have more than one person using a networked scanner. Not so handy that I have to run it.... That was the largest culprit.

Little snitch seemed to be contributing as long as the icon was present -- Even if I disabled animations.

Crashplan - Similar. Even with the mono-icon. I now don't use the menubar.

Chrome is a HUGE offender if you use notifications and hangouts and have the icons on - Hide the notifications icon, and get rid of the one for hangouts, and there should be immediate improvement.

I killed dropbox - Shame I can't just kill the icon.

Every one I kill, the better it gets. Chrome and the Brother application were drastic - Mission control ran at about 1-2 FPS before I killed them, but once I did, it was instant improvement.

I'm down to battery, clock, volume, and wireless status (which I just killed, because why not) - and the mandatory finder/notifications icons. I've turned transparency back on as well as automatic graphics switching, as an experiment.

I have a tunnelblick icon from time to time, as I require that, and I haven't figured out how to hide the icon yet -- It hasn't seemed to cause any slowdown, but I'm prepared to restart it if it does.

After trying everything else, this seems to be the only thing that has brought IMMEDIATE improvement. You probably don't need to kill the native apple tray icons, but at this point, I'm just killing it if I don't absolutely require it. You could definitely point to third party applications as the issue here, but it seems completely insane to me that a taskbar icon could cause so much havoc.

Today I got further request from Apple Support. So I sent them my App which just spins a little icon and slows down WindowServer. I'm pretty confident they will find that bug soon.

I haven't seen a trace of 10.10.1 beta though others claimed it would be out. Most likely that would not have a fix for our issue here.

Just kill Yosemite and get it over with. 👿

ps. woops, this was meant to be a reply to mysticmjc

If you were part of the Yosemite Public Beta program, then you should not be expecting an invitation to the 10.10.1 beta that Developers have been rumored to have. In any case, the NDA you signed would preclude you from discussing it here and if you do then expect the host to delete it.