Guide: How to solve Yosemite memory leaks and CPU usage

So yeah, after many tries to fix many issues with Yosemite i've had enough. For the first time in my mac experience i'm rolling back to a previous OS (Mavericks) with a pretty recent machine, sadly... 😟

Question I ask is why it took so long. Once I started going thru all this I jumped ship and went back. Welcome back. ::)

I've been trying for months to resolve the memory that Safari has been using. When I launched Safari it would start off with about 1.2 GB and start climbing from there. I could actually see it increasing in Activity Monitor. After about 2-3 days it would have increased to over 10GB and my memory would be in the yellow and my system would come to a screeching halt. I would have to quit Safari and reboot. After following these steps Safari launches using 155 MB and after running for 6 hours it is still under 200 MB.

Thank you Luis_Mercado! I believe you solved my problem!

Worked very well for me, thanks much!

Hello,

i had the same WindowServer memory problem whit my imac 24" (yosemite) and when I switch to a new imac 5k the problem was not solved.

I have create a new user but nothing, I have reinstalled a fresh Yosemite OS but without results.

I followed Luis_Mercado procedure but unfortunately my imac works fine for only 2 hours and then the WindowServer memory increase again up to 20 GB and more.

After that I have done this 3 think:

- Update google drive

- Close the Stickies.app and removed from the login item in the system preferences - users & groups

- Apple menu - User log out - and uncheck the box "reopen windows when logging back in" (or something like that, my os is in Italian 😕)

When I logged in again my mac was working OK (I am using it for two working days without problems), WindowServer memory goes from 50 MB to 350 MB up and down - not only up.

I don't know what help me but now I am happy again.

I hope this is helpful to someone. Have a nice day

so did I。

I used a new disk to install mavericks on my mac, waiting for apple's update about fixing these problems.

Despite 10.10.2 I got a SBBOD for several seconds when I tried to switch to this thread on Safari and another one right again. A fluent system looks different. They should rename it to 10.Vista. Hasta la vista, baby.

It would probably be better to find out why your installation does not work correctly, like mine does.

Well, notwithstanding the fact that I'm not supposed to find it out rather than Apple to provide a smoothly running system: how could I find that out? All I see is the SBBOD. It does not appear all time, but I saw it more than once (and never ever in a previous OSX version).

I re-tested the WindowServer behavior. When idle it jumps between 2 and 7% and after turning on my spinning icon it starts jumping between 10 and 15%. The only things on the window that do graphics are the activity monitor and my spinning icon. I "feels" as if this behavior is a bit better in 10.10.2 than it was in the first release. But still if such a little icon animation eats up 3 to 8% of the CPU then something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

I do not expect a solution. At least not in the near future. But it's some sort of relief to cry out my pain from time to time.

That's your choice, I prefer not to assume that someone will rescue me, I take care of it myself.

Good luck.

As far as I can I do the same. But here I'm definitely lost. My last resort is a complete installation from scratch. But the pain is not that high that I feel to force to do it. Crying out once in a month is ok ;-) Once I have a good reason I'll go that way. Cheers.

It may well be simpler to identify the culprit(s) and delete or update them to versions compatible with Yosemite.

Download and run this (Etrecheck), post the report here, let's see how standard your installation is.

It's a nice app, but it did not help. It shows a couple of daemons/agents were killed due to memory pressure. But of course not who was responsible for the pressure. Personally I'm not aware of any application that will use lots of memory - except XCode and maybe Safari (I have not played minecraft for a while...). It might be that (intentionally for a test) I created and started an App eating lots of memory. But as said: the perpetrator is not listed.

If you want to interpret the report for yourself I will leave you to it.

Sure a clean install will give you a cleaner machine by getting rid of legacy garbage and all the unnecessary stuff, but there is no grantee it will fix the Yosemite memory leak problem. The problem is just going to persist even after a clean install. The apps will continue to hog resource and grow their size in memory until they bring your Mac to a total halt. I can confirm this, since I repartitioned and erased Macintosh HD, and then I commented a clean install. I did not install any application at all, so there were just Apple's built in applications. I tested my MacBook Pro for a week, and guess what happened? The apps in the activity monitor started to eat more and more memory space(Mail and Safari are the major culprits) until they made my Mac stop completely! So I'm going back to Mavericks now, and I will not install Yosemite until this major issue and the ugly interface is fixed. I just don't have more time to spend on fixing my Mac anymore! This is a Mac for byte's sake not a PC! It's supposed to work for users not the other way around!