Sunday, August 10, 2008

Leopard memory woes...

I am in a state today. Out of necessity, I added a third GB of memory to my MacBook Pro last week because (IMHO) there is a memory issue in Leopard. This screenshot shows what has become the normal state of affairs memory-wise since I upgraded to Leopard.

MassiveMemoryLeak
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I may find myself working away with the usual cadre of programs running on my desktop (Mail, Twhirl, iChat, Adium, Preview, Eclipse, iTerm, TextMate) and expect that a fair amount of system resources are being taken up. Fine. However, after shutting everything down I would expect that most of the memory occupied by the running programs is reclaimed by the OS and is available for reuse. That's definitely not the case. WTF is kernel_task doing with a quarter of a GB of memory? Why is Finder holding on to 80 MB?

I have been generally very happy with the Leopard upgrade. Feature-wise, it is an improvement on what was already a fantastically strong platform. However, efficient resource utilization is not an unreasonable expectation for a modern operating system and Leopard totally fails in this area.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Have you considered reinstaling Leopard from scratch? I have not had any problems since upgrading and my machine runs great with 2 GB of RAM.