MacOS – My Mac recently using RAM like hell

gmailmacosmemoryperformance

I have 8 GB of ram and I have only 1.25GB free memory left, not enough to run 2 tabs of gmail. for chrome keep asking me to kill the process of my Gmail which 2-3 days ago I'm always have like 2-3GB free memory after opening 2 gmail accounts and some others websites.

I also installed auto memory clean to help me get more memory back but recently when my mac start, a few minutes later memory almost dropped to 0GB so my memory cleaner app keep to clean memory after that memory consuming so fast and repeat above process again. Memory clean doesn't solve my problem in a long term.

I have closed all the apps to free memory and I see that when idle I should have more memory back but it's not.

So I looked into Activity Monitor and Memory clean app, I saw 2 things that consuming lots of memory which I don't think it's true.

I'm trying to use cleanmymac 2 to help me solve the issue specially to kick away some file cache problem, but I don't see any difference.

Best Answer

First of all it's probably a good idea to stop using that memory cleaner app. They aren't necessary these days; if they ever were. The memory systems on modern operating systems are perfectly capable of maintaining themselves. The way these memory cleaner application work is by claiming a huge chunk of RAM, thereby forcing everything not critical out of RAM, and then releasing the RAM they've requested. Your swapping something that has been fine tuned over years by a lot of very smart people, with some guy wielding a mallet.

This could actually be the reason you are seeing your free RAM drop to zero. It could be the memory cleaner app itself.

The idea that you need to have a large amount of RAM sitting "free" is just wrong. When you close applications the RAM isn't necessarily immediately freed. All modern operating systems keep recently used files cached in RAM so that if you (or the system) decide to reopen something recently closed the files open quicker.

If you do have a performance problem with Gmail in Chrome the problem is likely elsewhere. I highly doubt it has anything to do with the amount of free RAM on your Mac.

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Mac – Why is mds using so much Real Memory

The obvious thing to try is eject the Time Machine volume (or otherwise make it unavailable - turned off) and reboot the mac. mds will only use RAM when a program is asking it to supply spotlight answers. The files you have are using a large amount of space and being called upon. A clean boot should get your mds with little or no RSS until you start to launch apps or TM starts.

Whether this is normal is harder to tell - even if it's caused by your files, it's likely made worse a direct result of the PPC architecture not having as optimized a time of indexing than the Intel architecture. The mds program likely is coded with parts of the code for PPC and part for Intel as part of the normal performance optimizations Apple or any large corporation will do before releasing a daemon that runs all the time. Furthermore, the frameworks it uses will be native to the processor - so it's not really the same program running when you have a different CPU.

The comments to the question show that you have really down your homework and played around a bit with excluding volumes to see if the large memory is happening in response to many drives being indexed.

Sadly, you don't have any real control over how large the process gets. It simply runs based on the spotlight importers that are present on your system and in response to all the filesystems you expose the spotlight subsystem to.

If the obvious step of isolating Time Machine doesn't reduce the RAM usage, You can also try:

cleaning out third party spotlight extensions
add more RAM and live with it
permanently disable the folders that are causing RAM usage to spike (and forego the usefulness of spotlight)
temporarily disabling all volumes by putting them on the privacy exclusion list and then slowly adding folders to be indexed and hope to determine which sort of data is causing the worst spike in
use Shark and their kind (part of Xcode and the CHUD tools) to sample the running mds process and map out the memory allocation as it is happening. This is fairly high on the skill level and won't change your end solution either way - you'll just know why - and maybe still not have a cure.

Also sadly for you - most people are not running 10.5 on PPC chips, so the number of people that can run some tests or have seen this and poked around the issue it to find out what sort of file or importer might be likely to take more memory once mds gets it's hands on the metadata store.

It does sound odd - so you have a very valid point with more than usual RAM usage. But, it's not necessarily something that is wrong - you just might have data that needs that large amount of RAM. Only by taking your data to a similar mac or doing the process of elimination can you know for sure.

MacOS – opendirectoryd taking up 1/4 of the cpu and driving fans crazy on MacBook Air

Here are the results of my investigation: https://superuser.com/a/426719/135263

As mentioned by @juanpablo, this may be caused by symlinks.

Apparently, if a symlink points to /home, autofs or automountd fire and take a lot of CPU to figure out that the place indeed doesn't exist.

Take a look at /etc/auto_home and /etc/autofs.conf.

To see if you're being hit by this particular problem, set

AUTOMOUNTD_VERBOSE=TRUE

option in autofs.conf, restart automountd

sudo launchctl stop com.apple.automountd

and review the syslog.log (you may use application: Console). You're affected by this problem if you see something like that:

May 20 17:53:43 xxx automountd[31709]: od_search failed

To workaround, edit the file /etc/auto_master and remove (or hash out #) the line starting with /home. Then run:

sudo automount -vc

Best Answer

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