Figured i would throw this out here since there seems to be a wealth of experience on this forum.
I have a single user(teacher) who seems to be plagued by a memory leak on her macbook pro laptops. She is one of our heavier users, and also one of the more technically inclined. She has been through 3 laptops, first was a 10.6.8 macbook pro, then a brand new 10.7 macbook pro and just recently we issued her a brand new 10.8 macbook pro. Each machine has started exhibiting severe memory leaks to the point it becomes unusable.
I've taught her the "Purge" command, but that only lasts for 5-10 minutes and then her 4 gigs are rapidly sitting in the Used, or Inactive category and the laptop is sluggish as can be. Ive gone through the running processes and cannot find anything odd, or anything consuming the memory. She has only installed 1 or two small programs on this machine so far since it was just issued to her on Monday. I feel bad for her since im at a loss on where to go next.....any suggestions?
Single User, multiple machines, all exhibiting memory leaks
+9
+11It does sound like something that she is doing to the machine, maliciously or not. I would take a closer look at the apps she is installing and pay attention to anything that might be a menu bar extension or something that may run as a service in the background.
As Jared was alluding to, I think, was check the JSS Unix reports for the top output (if you collect this info). If not, you can run the following command in terminal to see what is taking up the most CPU at any given time.
top -o cpu
+24Agreed with @freddie.cox. Something like this can't just be a coincidence. One Mac, sure, two Macs, unlikely. At 3 you need to start looking closely at what she's installing. Because its only 1 or 2 small apps means nothing. Its not about quantity but quality. All it takes is for one badly coded app or something incompatible with the OS to start causing odd issues.
I'd be curious to see if a brand new or freshly imaged Mac with nothing else installed starts exhibiting the same issue for her. if it does, then I call gremlins, lol. But something tells me a new system with just what you imaged it with won't give her any issues.
+11Also, just because the Activity Monitor usage shows "inactive" doesn't mean the RAM isn't available for use to the machine, its just ram that it hasn't re-allocated since it has been used recently. Here's Apple's kb article that describes the different states of RAM in Activity Monitor: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
It may be worth observing her habits a bit to see if it may be a training issue rather than a hardware/software issue. I would recommend ARD or ScreenSharing if that is implemented just because you would have more of a chance of seeing her natural habitat than looming over their shoulder. Obviously if you have policies against doing that without the permission of the user your mileage may vary.
+9Thanks for all the responses!
We are not collecting the unix info, but i will play with the top command a bit.
Literally she was experiencing this behavior after simply installing "Boardmaker for Mac" which we do have other users using and not seeing this behavior. a simple google search for memory leaks and mac seem to overwhelmingly point in the direction of safari. My first suggestion to her on her second issue mac was to stop using safari, and try firefox. I was never able to pinpoint any process or application viewable through activity monitor that seemed to consume more resources than it should. She called me back a couple hours ago and actually told me that she has only NOW stopped using safari, and she does not seem to be running out of memory! She was going to keep me posted on how things go with firefox only.
With regards to the activity monitor ram display, i was aware that the mac should be able to use the inactive memory, but it does not appear to with her machines. The used memory just keeps growing and then it starts swapping HD space which is likely why the machine then comes to a sluggish crawl and struggles to even close an open app.
I do have ARD and permission to connect to any of our machines at will, so if the memory leak surfaces again while using firefox i may look into monitoring her routine via ard.
Thanks again for the responses
+24Funny you mention moving to Firefox as I've had historically horrendous memory leaks with it. What version of Safari?
+24Older versions of Safari definitely had memory leak bugs, but more recent updates should have addressed that. I'm also curious to know what version of Safari. In the last case, when you gave her a MBP with Mountain Lion it should be running Safari 6.0. I use that all day long with literally dozens of open tabs and windows and never have memory leak issues.
+9while i cant confirm what version safari was at on the 10.7 machine, i know it was the latest available via software update at the time. On the Mountain Lion machine she was obviously using safari 6.0
She never called me back after our talk in the morning yesterday, so i assume her memory leak stopped once she switched to firefox. I will be following up with her to do a bit more investigation on her safari config/usage. will post here if i find anything interesting
+24Yeah, let us know what you discover. Seems really odd that Safari would be the culprit across 3 different Macs running different OSes and presumably different versions of Safari.
I wonder if there is a browser plug-in (Flash?) that is the root of the issue here? Or perhaps a site she visits regularly that is somehow causing Safari problems? Definitely curious.
+12I'd like to add my .02 about Safari and Java. The environment is currently at 10.6.8, Java 1.6.0_37, and Safari 5.1.7, but until recently we were at Safari 5.1.2 and some earlier version of Java (apologies for not knowing the specific build, if i Had it my way I'd remove java from everything). Anyway somewhere about Safari 5.1 and Java 1.6.0_22 (?) we were having a super hard time using IBMs HOD (Host on Demand) application with Safari, presumably from memory leakage, but not entirely sure since it WAS java after all. Oddly though, FF 3.6.20 worked just fine.
My point is it may not be java or flash themselves causing the problem, but rather what is being used that requires those plugins. Safari 5.1.7 and the latest Java 6 (build 37 I think) seem to play nicely with HOD nowadays.
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