Guide: How to solve Yosemite memory leaks and CPU usage

NO. This is NOT going to work. You should not come to this point to fix this issue.

It is caused by sluggish WindowServer. There must be some bug in the system.

I am disappointed at Yosemite. The new system is buggy.

PS: and this thread should NOT be marked as solved.

Thanks for posting this. It fixed the memory leak and cpu problems. But now every time my macbook sleeps when attached to my thunderbolt display, it crashes with grey screen of death when I wake it. And the magic mouse stopped working 12 hours after I did you fix. Any ideas - Apple support has been the exact opposite of helpful.

Thank you too for posting this!! I thought, I was alone with my freezing-problem!!!!

MBP freezes after update to Yosemite

Does the problem go away, when you disconnect the second screen?

Well, WindowServer CPU usage is normal if I do not use a secondary screen. But how am I supposed get any work done with just a 15" screen is beyond me, but hey, that's what Apple seems to have decided. YMMV.

Confirm.

Didn't have to reset SMC. Only PRAM.

Did a disk repair also with permission, found couple of bads (sad, but c'est la vie).

Now my macbook works like a charm with.

This morning I created a fresh new admin account on my mac to see if my main admin account was the only one to be affected by this impossibility to work or not?

See the results, I restarted the mac, open only one session (the new one called TEST) and with just activity monitor, I only had 5-6Gb left!!!

Besides, today on my main admin account the kernel_task grew from 900Mb (yesterday) to 1,1Gb today... hope it won't be 6Gb at the end of the months!.

C'mon APPLE, do you read this post? Some people bought a 2600€ mac and more, and their macs don't even have a year!!!

thank you.

www.demis.nu wrote:

This morning I created a fresh new admin account on my mac to see if my main admin account was the only one to be affected by this impossibility to work or not?

See the results, I restarted the mac, open only one session (the new one called TEST) and with just activity monitor, I only had 5-6Gb left!!!

There is nothing wrong with that. Since Mavericks, the Memory Management system attempts to keep RAM full at all times, much of it inactive cached files that are there to prevent having to fetch them from the Hard Drive. As long as the MEMORY PRESSURE graph at the bottom remains green, you should totally ignore the amount of RAM used. If it's need for something else, the system will take care of that.

C'mon APPLE, do you read this post?

Very doubtful. It's way too long and Engineering is far to busy to be reading what is here. The only way to be certain that Apple will read anything you say is to send them Feedback, if you were part of the Beta Test use Feedback Assistant or open a free developer account and file use Bug Reporter.

thank you, I sent them a report on th feedback link your kindly left me. But not really sure an answer will be given.

So just to make sure I made myself understood, I know things has changed since maverick from the RAM area and that's what I wrote in my previous answers. Under maverick I didn't have this slowdown behavior, I didn't have to click on refresh bouton on "memory clean" or "memory boost" apps 10 times per hours, never. Maybe 2-3 times per day. Now, since I installed yosemite, it has changed.

www.demis.nu wrote:

Under maverick I didn't have this slowdown behavior, I didn't have to click on refresh bouton on "memory clean" or "memory boost" apps 10 times per hours, never. Maybe 2-3 times per day. Now, since I installed yosemite, it has changed.

I haven't really been following this discussion and forget how I ever got here. My specialty is malware, so I probably dropped by to tell somebody they were infected.

But in another forum, I have had numerous discussions about this Memory thing for the last couple of years and we all agree that the use of utilities such as Memory Clean and Memory Boost are counter-productive and cause more harm than good. Lots of folks got used to needing them for previous OS's and I know they will tell you they have been updated for Mavericks and Yosemite, but that still doesn't take care of the fact that they inherently undo what the Memory Management system is trying to keep under control. Use them to keep track of memory usage if you must, but keep your finger off the button! If you have to use the refresh button continually, then something is very wrong. I correspond with hundreds of Yosemite users daily and none of them are have your issues. When I was having issue like this in Mavericks, a quick re-install of the OS took care of it for good.

Ok I understand now what you meant. Thank you for your advice man ;-)

To second this: memory management is one of the basic things an OS shall be able to handle (well!). If there's a need for a 3rd party memory management you can drop the OS. Since OS X is based on *NIX you can trust that memory management is in good hands and does not need outside help.

"Then I tried ALL THE TIPS kindly left in the original post by Luis_Mercado"

Did you try any of the things that solved mine ? My iMac is 2007 ! and it's now smooth as silk.

Thanks, this seems to have solved my similar Safari issues! I had tried a number of the other recommended steps on this site, but this was the one that worked!

jkbull - moving the icon to the upper right seems to make things much much happier compared to having it to the left. It does seem to make a difference.

Now I only seem to get slowdowns when I have tons of terminal / chrome tabs and windows open, but nothing related to tunnelblick or third party icons.

All, I agree that this isn't a minor bug. It's something that NEEDS to be tackled, and I'm not exactly thrilled either. It seems to be manageable in the meantime, though - at least in my case.

I tried this method and it was unsuccessful. I am not sure if I didn't remove external monitors correctly ( I don't have any idea if any are attached) but I did everything else correct. I entered Safe Mode, from there changed my fixed permissions and entered SMC then reset the PRAM. Nothing changed at all. It actually took me longer than normal to even write this response. My MAC is at a crawl.

What else could be the culprit?