What is using my memory?

[.Neo]

Gradually my HDD starts going nuts, the entire OS grinds to a halt and all applications become unresponsive. Within 10 minutes my 2010 iMac acts like it has to manage with a G3 at 600 MHz and 256 MB of memory instead of a Quad-Core Intel Core i7 at 2.93 GHz and 8 GB of memory.

When Activity Monitor finally pops open I'm baffled to see 7,95 GB of memory is being used with only 44,5 MB free. Looking at the application list nothing explains where it went.

A restart fixed the issue and the iMac was restored to its speedy self, but I'm still wondering where it went. :/ Any ideas?

[Dom]

I recently upgraded to 8gb so i've been watching my memory activity closer, so let me explain the graph a bit.

Used is your total ram, Wired + Active + Inactive, so 7.95 is fine.

Your Free Ram is well, ram not used being free

Wired ram i have no idea

Active ram is ram being used by process atm

Inactive ram is ram recently used thats kept kind of allocated for that program UNLESS it is needed by other program, example i read was say Mail uses 100mb, you close mail, those 100mb get to Inactive, if you open Mail again, this memory is restored resulting in a speedier open/reaction on the program, if Mail remains closed and another app requests those 100mb, then they will be given to it.

Now, this all sounds heaven, ive noticed too that having 2-3gb of inactive ram and 20-30mb of free ram my system has exactly the same reaction, which is strange, when i rebooted to free up stuff, everything has been fine since then, same usage, now with a new VM with Win7 open 100% of the time, which i must say its responsive after being idle for days, which is awesome, and free ram now acts quite fine getting freed every few minutes, this is what my graph looks like

Sadly i dont know whats causing this either, before (when i had 4gb) i assumed it was because of the hell of a multitasker i am, but it happened once with 8gb too (upgraded just a week ago, pc had one reboot since then).

[Xtreme $niper]

Wired RAM is that which is locked to a particular process and is not "shared" memory. This includes the kernel and also applications like VMWare Fusion which use wired instead of active RAM. I presume that's for reasons such as increased consistency or stability, but that's just a guess. Most apps don't use wired memory because it would defeat the purpose of memory management if they all locked their memory to their process.

As for where your RAM went, I can't really tell from that screenie. Not only that, but it seems that it was even going beyond your RAM and it started to allocate swap memory on your HDD. 1.26 GB worth. Ouch.

Keep an eye and see if it happens again. It could possibly have been a memory leak of some kind, but with no process associated to it, that's slightly mysterious.

[Guest]

Is this a one off thing, or has it been happening randomly?

[.Neo]

I found out it's a memory leak in VLC Media Player. I let it running with a media file on while doing groceries today, came back after two hours and the exact same thing happened all over again: Mac OS X unresponsive, applications unresponsive, HDD going insane because it was swapping over 1,8 GB this time around.

Before starting up VLC I worked behind my iMac for almost four hours without any issues even though I had Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Keynote, Pages, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto and QuickTime 7 Pro running. While doing groceries the only active application -- beyond the Finder, Dock etc. of course -- was VLC.

[Dom]

That makes sense, i stopped using VLC a few days ago as it wouldnt play a 1080p smoothly where MPlayer or Movist would without any issues.

[Elliott]

  On 08/04/2011 at 11:10, .Neo said:

I found out it's a memory leak in VLC Media Player. I let it running with a media file on while doing groceries today, came back after two hours and the exact same thing happened all over again: Mac OS X unresponsive, applications unresponsive, HDD going insane because it was swapping over 1,8 GB this time around.

Before starting up VLC I worked behind my iMac for almost four hours without any issues even though I had Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Keynote, Pages, Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto and QuickTime 7 Pro running. While doing groceries the only active application -- beyond the Finder, Dock etc. of course -- was VLC.

Doesn't surprise me. Every time I've used VLC, it's been a total piece of crap. It's amazing it was leaking that much memory.

[Xtreme $niper]

Ah, that sucks. At least you seemed to have pinpointed the problem. Does closing the VLC process release the memory and fix the issues? Or do you have to do a full reboot?

I only use VLC to test if some awkward video format plays normally before I end up streaming it to my PS3, so I've never left it running for longer than a few minutes.

[.Neo]

The iMac becomes next to useless so a restart is the quickest solution.

But yeah Elliott, I guess that's the downside of 64-bit applications: If there's a memory leak the app has access to all your memory.

[Dom]

MPlayer HD Extended has me pretty happy so VLC can die really :p.

[.Neo]

  On 10/04/2011 at 21:27, Dom said:

MPlayer HD Extended has me pretty happy so VLC can die really :p.

Totally forgot about that one! Trashed VLC and downloaded MPlayer.

[Flawed]

  On 08/04/2011 at 13:59, Dom said:

That makes sense, i stopped using VLC a few days ago as it wouldnt play a 1080p smoothly where MPlayer or Movist would without any issues.

I concur with the mplayer recommendation. I use the non-gui version, and it works as smooth as butter with GPU acceleration.