Guide: How to solve Yosemite memory leaks and CPU usage

Hello!

Unfortunately it does not help me. I don't have issues with memory leaks, but the high CPU usage and, consequently, slow work of all applications.

I had to choose "Reduce Transparency" for my Early 2013 Macbook Pro, with NVIDIA Video card and RAM 16GB to have normal performance. If I do uncheck "Reduce Transparency" the performance of my Macbook become terrible. Scrolling, switching between applications become very slow!

I wrote feedback to Apple about it.

Hi Luis

Thanks for sharing. I followed everything to the letter but to no avail. Finally I decided to re-install Yosemite but even that did not help. Did a clean install from a USB stick and that did not help either

Finally, after two days I found the problem: The iCloud bookmark synchronisation with Safari.

Turning this option sees the memory usage skyrocketing. 10GB within 5 minutes. Turning it off makes everything normal again. I was already thinking of using Chrome as my default browser..

Hope people can use this tip as well

Settings/Icloud/Safari - off

Thanks for posting that as I have not seen that solution proposed before. I suspect that if you walked away from your computer for a day or so, the sync would have completed and memory use would subside. There are certainly many time and memory consuming activities associated with a Yosemite upgrade. Mine took about 24 hours and I have yet to activate iDrive for a variety of reasons, so would not have noticed that.

Does this solution work on OSX mavericks too ( v10.9.5 ). I have MacBpro with 8GB and I am having memory issues.

Thanks

sashikanths wrote:

Does this solution work on OSX mavericks too ( v10.9.5 ). I have MacBpro with 8GB and I am having memory issues.

I doubt that. Starting with Mavericks, the OS attempts to keep RAM as full as possible for maximum speed and efficiency (so it doesn't have to read your drive all the time). To see if you need more RAM open Activity Monitor (found in /Applications/Utilities/), click on the Memory tab to keep an eye on the graph at the bottom called MEMORY GUAGE then open How to use Activity Monitor and click on the Memory button. As long as it's stays green most of the time, you are not having memory issues.

Seems like your solution solved it! Thank you!

Thank you so much for helping me solve this problem!

Well。I come here to report a good news。My machine is macbook pro late 2011。I had install OS X 10.11 for about one year，keep freezing。

After I tested 10.10.2 ，I change my hard disk and back to 10.9。because I had to use a few seconds to type just each words on 10.10。。。for about half a year（oh my godness）

But 10.10.4 beta2 became much better，computer got freeze after 2 hours。

And I had Continuous worked on 10.10.4 beta3 for 5 hours，and it didn't got freeze。

I believe Apple will repair this bug on 10.10.4 release。（at least for MacBook Pro late 2011）

😢 thanks apple engineer，I hope apple can do better on 10.11。😉

Thanks for posting this. I have had very strange video effects on the screen, Contacts and Mail (accountsd) hogging CPU and creating circular loops in console... I'd done a permissions fix and a PRAM reset, but to no avail, however the steps in this order have seemed to clear a whole range of issues so far (3 hours in, but a noticeable change).

Thanks again for posting.

10.10.4 beta4 is a bit slower after woking on it for 9 hours。

Thank you so much! Solved my problem too. mds, mds worker, kernal_task, and other processes would occasionally go to 100% or more and would cause my macbook pro to crawl and overheat my cpu and gpu. After following your instructions, everything was working fine until I used the spotlight search app "Alfred". I realized using Alfred would cause the mds and mds worker to go crazy, so I removed the app and so far everything is working really good.

This soled it for me, at least immediately after reboot; and I've tried the PRAM reset first before I stumbled upon this article... but it seems the complete instructions here worked wonders. Quite sad, really--hopefully Apple squashes this bug quickly... I've filed a report as i'm sure others have as well.

Thanks for the great instructions.

seems to have resolved my Ruby process from going up to 99% all the time! thanks!

This didnt work for me at all, as a matter of fact now that I have done the steps I have less RAM than ever-I used to have 2.7gb on startup and it floated down to single digits over a day or two, now I start with less than 1.3Gb and am in single digits almost immediately. Perhaps I did something wrong so I am going to try again but any other advice is welcomed-Mid 2009 Mac Book Pro. 4Gb ram-THANKS

Yosemite (and Mavericks before that) is designed to keep RAM as full as possible. You should ignore those numbers, open Activity Monitor to the Memory Tab and watch the MEMORY PRESSURE graph at the bottom. Details in Use Activity Monitor on your Mac.

If you are having issues then best to start a new discussion outlining them in order to attract a new set of troubleshooters as most have left this months old, too long discussion. That's just the way this Forum works best.