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Preview App memory leak

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)

Posted on Oct 12, 2015 9:30 PM

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75 replies

Feb 12, 2016 2:35 AM in response to dialabrain

No, the point here is that PDFKit doesn't need this amount of money. You don't need 16 GB of memory to open a PDF document of 2 MB. PDF Expert doesn't need that amount of memory. Foxit reader does not need that amount of memory. Acrobat Reader doesn't. Preview on Yosemite didn't. A computer with a total of 16 GB of RAM can not run out of memory because of a PDF document if the other applications are using 2 GB total. This is a bug, or very poor design. Also, this is a regression, because on Yosemite the problem was not there.


I don't know if you are a lawyer working for Apple and I can't explain your urge to contradict me but I can live with that. I've reported my experience in this thread (and I'm not the only one having the problem, I'd say) and I hope that someone will come with an answer or a workaround for this.

Feb 19, 2016 2:28 AM in response to jmmun

Fine, let's stop calling it "memory leak". From now on we will call it "clever memory management". Apple should have put it on the advertisement page for OSX.


What's new in OSX El Capitan:


Clever memory management: opening a 2MB PDF document will only require 10 GB of RAM. Up to 1000x more memory used than the previous OSX version! And OSX doesn't even need to free that amount of memory: it will simply force quit other applications if the system runs out of memory!

Feb 19, 2016 2:48 AM in response to jmmun

jmmun wrote:


It isn't the same thing "memory which is no loger needed is not released" and "If it had a leak OSX would not be able to release that memory when needed". The second one is what you say.


Preview simply doesn't stop increasing his RAM usage, this is actually a memory leak

It is exactly the same thing.


And FWIW, Preview does stop increasing it's memory use.


Anything else?

Feb 19, 2016 3:17 AM in response to dialabrain

It isn't the same thing "release the memory when you don't need it" and "release the memory when you need it". And maybe not in your case, but in mine and in the others, it don't stope increasing, test it doing zooming and scrolling.


Software engineering here, it's a memory leak.

This is insane, more than 10GB, only one PDF, 5MB, 37 pags, it increase at the same time I'm doing scrolling and zooming, I can continue doing it and it didn't stop increasing:

User uploaded file

EDIT: OSX 10.11.3 here

Preview App memory leak

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