The Preview app in El Capitan has serious memory leak problem. Open a 100MB pdf file, scroll for a while, it will easily consumes giga bytes of RAM! Once it used 8G!
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11)
Happens here.
I have reported the bug on https://bugreport.apple.com/, let's see how many years will it take Apple to fix this. It is strange that the Preview app is one of the most touted improvements of El Capitan, yet so far nobody really tested it.
I have the exact same problem, with a PDF file less than 1 megabyte with 11 pages. Scrolling through the document is also choppy.
This problem occurs on my Macbook Pro Retina 2013 and my Mac Mini 2011 with El Capitan.
A "kind-of" workaround for this: use Safari to open large PDF. It is limited functionality: view only, no markups, etc, but it saves memory.
I tried other PDF program:
1. Adobe Reader : Memory consumption is good, meaning no leak. However, it is slow and there are problems with rendering, sometimes it doesn't show part of a file.
2. Skim: Slow and has memory leak too.
Same problem for me on iMac Retina 5K, 24 GB RAM
Tried PDF Reader Free, and also a memory leak problem.
No need to open a 100 MB pdf file to observe the huge memory consumption. A PDF file only constituted of text, 2,7 MB : each page used 25 MB of RAM, funny isn't it ?
It is lame that Apple let the Preview out without through testing.
I found one App that worked well is Foxit PDF reader for Mac https://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/pdf-reader/. The UI is not perfect since it is new, but the resource consumption is definitely lean.
Thank you, I've just tried it now. And it works fine. Memory consumption didn't change after scrolling through 150 pages.
I have the same problem also.
So much for all the talk about "focus on refinement and speed" ... Apple, get some Testing/QA advice..
It works, however, it is not optimized for retina display. The text looks kind of fuzzy.
Apple really needs to fix this. I am running the latest public beta that just came out today and the problem is still not fixed.
I have an iMac Retina 5K, and nothing is fuzzy in what is displayed by Foxit Reader. Everything is fine.
Wow, someone has some very interesting discovery: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/205332/why-does-leaked-memory-appear-ma lloced-to-kernel-task-and-why-cant-os-x-theref
FYI, PDF Expert just released the Mac version and it is as good as the iOS version! A bit expensive at $20, but if you read a lot of PDF files, it's definitely worth the money!
So far i am really liking the PDF Expert app. One thing though, does anyone know if there is a way we can set the preferences so that it remembers the place in the file? For example, when i open a PDF file, i want it to remember what page i was on before i last closed it and automatically bring me to that page (just like Preview).
Thanks
The same problem. Apple, fix it please. I didn't have this issue on Yosemite. Apple support says that I should wait new versions of El Capitan. System diagnostic don't show any problems on mac.
rMBP 13 early 2015
OS X El Capitan 10.11.1
Preview App memory leak
