Using iStat Menus I can watch how my system memory (16 GB on MBP retina) is used. When I boot up I have about 15% usage. Running Aperture alone to get maximum benefit of my memory, I watch the percentage rise over time. When it get to about 80% and above I usually quit Aperture to avoid hangs and other problems (past experience). That drops memory usage down to maybe 30-40%, but never down to the low level at startup.
I understand this is RAM holding stuff in memory, and only a reboot lets me get it all back.
My question concerns Aperture's use of memory. Is that build up to an eventual 80-90% usage normal? Is there anything that can reduce the usage, or at least the rate of consumption? For example, face recognition? Anything else? Is this gobbling up of memory usage related to “memory leak” or is that something totally different?
I suppose I could/should ask this on Apple's forums, but as it really is only an issue when I use Aperture I thought I would ask for your experiences and expertise.
Thanks.
Hi William
I watch my page outs in Activity monitor and the pie chart of allocated Ram. The Blue “inactive” grows quite large at the expense of the Green Free ram. Page outs happen when I run out of memory. So I use the Terminal app in Utilities and type, purge. This gives me more free ram for awhile but because I work on large files its a tempory fix. This also happens while using Photoshop cs6 too, oh and AP is not running at the same time.
I think AP has memory issues and am disappointed to hear you experiencing the same with 16 GB ram. Guess next mac I buy will have 32GB.
davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ
I dont use Faces or places or network hard drives for the reason of keep AP as fast as possible. I do have a DAS DroboS attached which is my slow point. But love it. Someday hope to get 32GB ram and a digital thunderbolt drobo.
davidbmoore@mac.com
Twitter= @davidbmoore
Scottsdale AZ
I’ve never paid much attention to my RAM usage … and since Aperture 3.3 … I haven’t had any issues with performance, locking up or crashes …
My primary work station is an iMac i5 2,5 Ghz with 12GB RAM, my working RAW images are stored on a JBOD 4-drive housing ( 4, 2TB SATA drives) via FW 800. My largest library is roughly 80k images and I can have Photoshop, Mail, Safari, Pages, Numbers and occasionally Lightroom open at the same time with no issues. I too don’t currently take advantage of Faces or Places. I also keep my startup drive very lean and mean … only using about 180 of 500 GB.