AnotherScott Posted February 15, 2013 Share Posted February 15, 2013 I doubt Spotlight is the issue, that service is tested/debugged to the Nth degree. Also, if you disable it, content lookups in for example Logic will stop working plus many other apps that use the fast file lookups via Spotlight. I agree, it's generally not reasonable to leave it disabled permanently, but I think it's a worthwhile troubleshooting step. It is not rock solid. Numerous times, when Spotlight failed to find something I knew was there, I had to rebuild the index to get it to work right again. I think it gets unhappy when you get low on disk space. And if you're tight on space, it may be worthwhile to exclude some folders from indexing. Maybe this is the best place for a shameless plug! Our now not-so-new new video at https://youtu.be/3ZRC3b4p4EI is a 40 minute adaptation of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock" - check it out! And hopefully I'll have something new here this year. ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ekewaka Posted February 15, 2013 Share Posted February 15, 2013 I doubt Spotlight is the issue, that service is tested/debugged to the Nth degree. Also, if you disable it, content lookups in for example Logic will stop working plus many other apps that use the fast file lookups via Spotlight. I agree, it's generally not reasonable to leave it disabled permanently, but I think it's a worthwhile troubleshooting step. It is not rock solid. Numerous times, when Spotlight failed to find something I knew was there, I had to rebuild the index to get it to work right again. I think it gets unhappy when you get low on disk space. And if you're tight on space, it may be worthwhile to exclude some folders from indexing. I was mostly thinking about memory leaks, if Spotlight leaks, then 99% of all Mac installations would have serious problems as it runs as a background service all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Bryce Posted February 15, 2013 Author Share Posted February 15, 2013 I don't know your system but I'm placing a high gamble bet on Chrome if you use that browser. Nope. Safari and Firefox. dB ==> David Bryce Music • Funky Young Monks <== Professional Affiliations: Royer Labs • Music Player Network Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Bryce Posted February 15, 2013 Author Share Posted February 15, 2013 Anyway, one possible culprit is Spotlight. Go to the Spotlight preference pane, and add your hard drive to its Privacy window (which will delete its index). Unfortunately, this disables a lot of functionality (like being able to search content in the Mail program), but you will be able to see if it's causing the problem. Either way, you can then remove it from the Privacy window, and it will start to rebuild its index (which will take a while... you can check its progress in the Spotlight pulldown on the top right of the menu bar). If the index was corrupt, that might be enough to fix it. If the problem went away with Spotlight indexing disabled but comes back after the drive is fully indexed, that's another issue we can address if it happens. I'l try that. Thanks, Scott! dB ==> David Bryce Music • Funky Young Monks <== Professional Affiliations: Royer Labs • Music Player Network Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ekewaka Posted February 15, 2013 Share Posted February 15, 2013 I don't know your system but I'm placing a high gamble bet on Chrome if you use that browser. Nope. Safari and Firefox. dB OK more guessing, are you using specific drivers for printers or some other devices? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timwat Posted February 15, 2013 Share Posted February 15, 2013 Don't know if this helps you at all, Dave, but it appears you're not the first person to hit the beach head: Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management... At least that's the claim of this guy from 2012. And here is a long, head-spinning (at least for me) volley of interwebz experts weighing in on the matter: Is it OS Xor not? Perhaps there's something of use to you in the long discussion. Anecdotally, I'm finding a fair amount of opinions that Mountain Lion fixed a lot of the mem mgmt problems. I'm still on Lion. .. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Bryce Posted February 15, 2013 Author Share Posted February 15, 2013 OK more guessing, are you using specific drivers for printers or some other devices? Not really. One HP printer driver...but all of the machines were doing it before I got the HP. dB ==> David Bryce Music • Funky Young Monks <== Professional Affiliations: Royer Labs • Music Player Network Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ELP71 Posted February 15, 2013 Share Posted February 15, 2013 I had a printer/scanner driver/software that was running my CPU usage to 100% routinely "in the background". I bet its something weird like that. Weasels ripped my flesh. Rzzzzzzz. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmp Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Something is deeply broken in OS X memory management... Ya think? Note that the word Unix was not used once on either page. OSX is not Unix and it is not an operating system. Period. It is less useful for computing than a keybed. You can write in pencil on a keybed and it'll remain there for centuries unless something really terrible happens. I've only been awake for a little over two hours and it's already wasted an hour of my time. Just another day. Reboot time. --wmp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theo Verelst Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 It's been long since I've used Macs much. "Memory Leak" is a C or other progamming language error (bug) when somehow chunks of memory are claimed, and forgotten to be released. If this happens at the OS level, it's a bad thing, but if it happens in some irrelevant program, you can simply stop and restart the progam (e.g.a network related service) to kill the results of the leak. Disconnecting from the network and stopping all the services could be a fix to try. Also, to keep internet and other basic access, creating a usb thumb drive with some flavor of "live" Linux can be a good idea. T.V. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Loving Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Why not just try OS 10.8.2 ? "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WheelHead Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Why not try what Apple suggested? I agree with the couple of posters here. Makes perfect sense what the Apple 'Genius' said and also take in consideration they have probably seen this in retail 100s of times since they are swarmed with customers **all day**. Memory leaks are notoriously a difficult problem to find the answer to. One app at a time makes perfect sense, imho. Piecemeal one at a time. W. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Loving Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Why not try what Apple suggested? I agree with the couple of posters here. Makes perfect sense what the Apple 'Genius' said and also take in consideration they have probably seen this in retail 100s of times since they are swarmed with customers **all day**. Memory leaks are notoriously a difficult problem to find the answer to. One app at a time makes perfect sense, imho. Piecemeal one at a time. W. Made perfect sense to me. Plus, if Mt Lion fixed whatever it is, just upgrade. Maybe these are Windows people trying to fix a Mac [no disparagement intended]. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe Muscara Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 The issue with upgrading a major OS revision such as 10.7 to 10.8 is he has to make sure all his current apps and drivers will work first. Also, some older Macs he may have may not run the latest OS. Mac OS 10.6 to 10.8 would be even worse, if that's what he's running. Lastly, as he stated, he would rather know what the cause is otherwise it can happen again. Look, I'm generally a big fan of the geniuses, I even have some friends who are or were geniuses. But sometimes, their advice isn't the best. I think there are some very good suggestions in the thread and I'm looking forward to hearing back from dB. "I'm so crazy, I don't know this is impossible! Hoo hoo!" - Daffy Duck "The good news is that once you start piano you never have to worry about getting laid again. More time to practice!" - MOI Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmp Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 I've met a lot of people I consider to be geniuses and a few Apple geniuses. Not the same thing. --wmp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnotherScott Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Plus, if Mt Lion fixed whatever it is, just upgrade. I would not suggest trying to do an upgrade on a malfunctioning system, that's asking for trouble. Clean it up first, or do a clean install... which is something he can also try with just what he has. Maybe this is the best place for a shameless plug! Our now not-so-new new video at https://youtu.be/3ZRC3b4p4EI is a 40 minute adaptation of T. S. Eliot's "Prufrock" - check it out! And hopefully I'll have something new here this year. ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ekewaka Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 I used to do clean upgrades when switching to major OS versions of many reasons. It's always nice to start from a clean slate, add SW one at a time and quickly eliminate issues. This is about a studio system that needs to run 100% of the time, so I'm always conservative with those. In addition, hard disks are so cheap today that it's fine to get another one and install the new OS on this one and migrate the SW over one at a time. If something fails, then back to the original one. As for memory fragmentation, concerning applications yes a restart of the app should cure such cases as the runtime is taking care of the memory blocks used. There's an extreme case where so much VM traffic has generated a huge VM section on the hard disk so everything is dead-slow, it's easy to check this by looking at the amount of free memory (oh I still remember the days in A/UX where we used a separate partition for VM...) Oh, also make sure you are not running the disk with little spare space, VM gets slower and slower and with SSD it's like a death kiss concerning performance. With 32-bit applications the app will just die and you get interesting messages in the system console; with 64-bit apps there's more address space so usually the app just gets slower and slower and slower and slower and you start to get SPODs... As for system-wide leaks, what happens is that drivers and similar system services lock down memory (wired memory), if this grows and grows, VM has less to work with and the system crawls down to a halt. This is a usually a driver-related bug. If possible it's always good to upgrade any drivers as most third party developers are pretty good fixing known issues as long as the end users know to upgrade. Nuff said. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Bryce Posted February 16, 2013 Author Share Posted February 16, 2013 Here's my problem with the clean install option. I've had this problem in my house for a few years now, across a couple of OS changes and in different computers owned by different members of my family. About a year ago, I bought a brand new laptop. I only installed a few things in it, all of them legitimately acquired...and even the laptop now shows the same symptoms. Isn't that essentially the same thing as a clean install? Why should I expect different results? And, as I asked in my first post - how would I do it? One program at a time...then use the computer for a while and see if it's affected...then, add another, rinse, repeat, etc...? Doesn't sound like the way to go to me. Besides, since I'm seeing the problem with no programs running, I'm not clear on what installing one program at a time will achieve.... dB ==> David Bryce Music • Funky Young Monks <== Professional Affiliations: Royer Labs • Music Player Network Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S_Gould Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 The best way to do it would be to do the clean install on an external drive (OS 1st, then add programs 1 at a time). Then, if all goes well, you can repeat the process on your internal (or just clone the external). Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WheelHead Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Besides, since I'm seeing the problem with no programs running, I'm not clear on what installing one program at a time will achieve.... dB There is also a process window (as you very well may know) in the activity monitor that you can stop the process (no app) besides seeing no programs running. W Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Nathan Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 I may be the least qualified person to weigh in on this, as I had no idea what "Memory Leak" even was, but when I Googled to see if I could find an explanation, one of the things that Google suggested was: "Mac Firefox Memory Leak" Since I'd noticed that you are a Firefox user, I thought it might be relevant. Forgive me if my ignorance is obvious to everyone but me. CLONK Don't rush me. I'm playing as slowly as I can! http://www.stevenathanmusic.com/stevenathanmusic.com/HOME.html https://apple.co/2EGpYXK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richwhite9 Posted February 16, 2013 Share Posted February 16, 2013 Ya think? Note that the word Unix was not used once on either page. OSX is not Unix and it is not an operating system. Period. It is less useful for computing than a The reason they misspelled Eunuchs? To save memory. How can the castrated Multics system be your favorite OS with that hierarchical file system of redundacy and recursive loops? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmp Posted February 17, 2013 Share Posted February 17, 2013 How could I possibly answer a question that you don't understand? Multics is bloated madness, attempting to be all things to all people in one confusing box. It was divine intervention that AT&T saw their folly in time. Saving memory is righteous and good. Memory leaks are unforgivable sins. You're supposed to wipe the seat. You should use memory in the same way you alloc() and free() beer. Hierarchical hierarchical file system of redundacy and recursive loops? Are you a Mac genius? --wmp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richwhite9 Posted February 17, 2013 Share Posted February 17, 2013 Are you a Mac genius? I've avoided iTunes all my life. That qualifies doesn't it? I surely understand memory leaks and garbage collection ........ I thought your Unix tirade was a fine piece of performance art in that area.....this happens to old men with a eunuchs fetish. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richwhite9 Posted February 17, 2013 Share Posted February 17, 2013 The OP may find this post helpful Some cut and paste command line stuff to capture memory after startup, dump to excel, and then capture again 5 hours later, dump to excel and compare. http://superuser.com/questions/244553/mac-os-x-what-is-using-my-active-memory I hate the whack-a-mole approach of starting programs individually. Mostly because I'm too lazy. Start them up, snap shot, and snapshot 5 hours later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmp Posted February 17, 2013 Share Posted February 17, 2013 I surely understand memory leaks and garbage collection ........ I thought your Unix tirade was a fine piece of performance art in that area.....this happens to old men with a eunuchs fetish. That was a Mac lament. A tirade is something else. I'm beginning you think you don't understand what I'm talking about. I don't understand what you're talking about. I don't understand why people take memory leaks and still don't know how to collect garbage in 2013. How surely do you understand memory leaks and garbage collection? --wmp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThisSiteSucks Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 I'm more a business/Windows programmer, but I've delved into Mac OS programming. The Mac requires the programmer to handle all memory allocation and deallocation. Then again, it just could be that the memory has been used and "marked" as used, but not needed yet, so it looks like it's being used. Regardless, Activity Mon should show you high-memory use programs. For reference, open up a Terminal window and type "purge". Your free memory should be reallocated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ekewaka Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 I'm more a business/Windows programmer, but I've delved into Mac OS programming. The Mac requires the programmer to handle all memory allocation and deallocation. Then again, it just could be that the memory has been used and "marked" as used, but not needed yet, so it looks like it's being used. Regardless, Activity Mon should show you high-memory use programs. For reference, open up a Terminal window and type "purge". Your free memory should be reallocated. Mac runtime had garbage collection but it introduced so many issues and problems.... The new thing is ARC, the compiler figures out what objects should be released and when -- works really well. It's up to the third party developers to use ARC or not (it's a project setting.) With Instruments it is pretty easy to find memory leaks and zombies. As for system level and driver programming, that's another issue, one just need to be careful with mallocs and reallocs... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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