As you guys are aware of, I just got my MacBook, and I'm still experiencing the should-not-exist-learning-curve... Anyways, today, I noticed something funny, and I figured I'd share with all of you.
Earlier today, I was unable to start any applications... I'd type the application name via QS, and QS would go away, but no app. I'd use Finder to go to /Applications and attempt to manually launch it, and nothing would happen. Finally, when I tried to start iTerm, it told me it was unable to fork. Linux instincts kicked in and told me that the problem came from lack of resources or PIDs. So I quickly quit a few apps (I had upwards to 30 applications running at that time), and long and behold, I was able to start applications again. I checked my processes list via terminal, and noticed a bunch of idle perl processes -- It's still a mystery to me as to what they are, as I was unable to kill them individually, nor through killall, nor could I see them via Activity monitor, but that's besides the point. I rebooted the system, and it seems to be running fine now (and the idle perl processes have yet to return *touch wood*).
I decided I want to pay attention to my resources usage, and make sure my system doesn't lock up on me. I have the habit of leaving commonly used applications running... this is even the case when I was still on Windows. This is when I started to notice a funny trend. It'd appear that applications on OSX suffers even more evident memory leak/consumption problem than their Windows counter part! Here's a quick break down of memory usage oddities after around 12 hours of me working:
iTunes - Real Memory: 220.8MB, Virtual Memory: 2.0GB
Firefox - Real Memory: 208.4MB, Virtual Memory: 1.7GB
Mail - Real Memory: 150.2MB, Virtual Memory: 1.4GB
Last.fm - Real Memory: 92.7MB, Virtual Memory: 1023.49MB
uTorrent - Real Memory: 16.28MB, Virtual Memory: 973.33MB
iTunes I understand, I have tons of music (library of 1699 tracks, 14.13 GB total) and most of them are tagged with album art, so it takes resource to load when I play songs. But on Windows, my iTunes usually floats at around 150MB of memory usage, not 220MB! So I quickly quit iTunes and restarted it. Surely, it dropped down to 70MB of real memory, and arond 1GB of virtual memory -- though, as I wrote these, it grew slowly to 85.52MB and 1.07GB already.
Firefox I understand... The prefetching "feature" and caching of tabs etc. does eat up quite a bit of resources... On Windows I've seen it gone up to as much as 600MB of memory, too... So I just killed it and restarted. It's coasting at around 107MB right now...
Mail - I wonder if it downloaded all my mails from gmail, even though I said IMAP, and tries to load them into memory over time... Mail is now consuming only 51MB and 1.0GB after quit and relaunch.
Last.fm - WHY?! It's a tiny icon that does nothing but scrob my musics! ... and I don't even listen to music from it. Restarted it and its now only eating 21MB and 986.49MB of memory.
uTorrent - This one is tiny, but still worth mentioning... Because I didn't do anything with it! I simply decided to download it to see if it is exactly the same as the Windows counter part. Forgot about it, and left it idling. No downloading, no seeding, no hash checking, nothing. Main window isn't even open (so I don't see it on expose)! Restarting it seem to have make it go down to 13.17MB, and 966.61MB though.
So, yeah... tip to make your OSX run faster? Just quit your apps and restart them every now and then! It's surprising to see their memory grows so rapidly, even if you're not doing anything with them...
Earlier today, I was unable to start any applications... I'd type the application name via QS, and QS would go away, but no app. I'd use Finder to go to /Applications and attempt to manually launch it, and nothing would happen. Finally, when I tried to start iTerm, it told me it was unable to fork. Linux instincts kicked in and told me that the problem came from lack of resources or PIDs. So I quickly quit a few apps (I had upwards to 30 applications running at that time), and long and behold, I was able to start applications again. I checked my processes list via terminal, and noticed a bunch of idle perl processes -- It's still a mystery to me as to what they are, as I was unable to kill them individually, nor through killall, nor could I see them via Activity monitor, but that's besides the point. I rebooted the system, and it seems to be running fine now (and the idle perl processes have yet to return *touch wood*).
I decided I want to pay attention to my resources usage, and make sure my system doesn't lock up on me. I have the habit of leaving commonly used applications running... this is even the case when I was still on Windows. This is when I started to notice a funny trend. It'd appear that applications on OSX suffers even more evident memory leak/consumption problem than their Windows counter part! Here's a quick break down of memory usage oddities after around 12 hours of me working:
iTunes - Real Memory: 220.8MB, Virtual Memory: 2.0GB
Firefox - Real Memory: 208.4MB, Virtual Memory: 1.7GB
Mail - Real Memory: 150.2MB, Virtual Memory: 1.4GB
Last.fm - Real Memory: 92.7MB, Virtual Memory: 1023.49MB
uTorrent - Real Memory: 16.28MB, Virtual Memory: 973.33MB
iTunes I understand, I have tons of music (library of 1699 tracks, 14.13 GB total) and most of them are tagged with album art, so it takes resource to load when I play songs. But on Windows, my iTunes usually floats at around 150MB of memory usage, not 220MB! So I quickly quit iTunes and restarted it. Surely, it dropped down to 70MB of real memory, and arond 1GB of virtual memory -- though, as I wrote these, it grew slowly to 85.52MB and 1.07GB already.
Firefox I understand... The prefetching "feature" and caching of tabs etc. does eat up quite a bit of resources... On Windows I've seen it gone up to as much as 600MB of memory, too... So I just killed it and restarted. It's coasting at around 107MB right now...
Mail - I wonder if it downloaded all my mails from gmail, even though I said IMAP, and tries to load them into memory over time... Mail is now consuming only 51MB and 1.0GB after quit and relaunch.
Last.fm - WHY?! It's a tiny icon that does nothing but scrob my musics! ... and I don't even listen to music from it. Restarted it and its now only eating 21MB and 986.49MB of memory.
uTorrent - This one is tiny, but still worth mentioning... Because I didn't do anything with it! I simply decided to download it to see if it is exactly the same as the Windows counter part. Forgot about it, and left it idling. No downloading, no seeding, no hash checking, nothing. Main window isn't even open (so I don't see it on expose)! Restarting it seem to have make it go down to 13.17MB, and 966.61MB though.
So, yeah... tip to make your OSX run faster? Just quit your apps and restart them every now and then! It's surprising to see their memory grows so rapidly, even if you're not doing anything with them...
Leave a comment