Lightroom 5 (Mac) memory leak

FlyTVR

FlyTVR

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Right, I've just updated my Mac to 32GB RAM as I've been having performance issues with Lightroom 5.

I've started studying Activity Monitor, and I've noticed that each time I move to a new image in Lightroom, LR grabs a chunk of memory. Over the period of a morning, the free memory drains from 20ish GB down to single figures.

The strange thing is that the memory used by LR (according to AM) is stable at around 2GB.

Closing (or force quiting) LR to close does NOT return the memory.

Now coming from a PC background, I am at a loss how to work out what is actually going wrong. I can't see anything in AM that is sucking up all the memory.

The same symptoms exists when exporting from LR.

Any ideas?

Cheers.

Dav
 
Thats strange. The most I've ever been able to force LR to is 6.1 GB RAM. And thats using the zenfolio plugin.

It sounds like somethings wrong, are you using any third party plugins? and how are your file handling preferences set?

H
 
boyfalldown said:
Thats strange. The most I've ever been able to force LR to is 6.1 GB RAM. And thats using the zenfolio plugin.

It sounds like somethings wrong, are you using any third party plugins? and how are your file handling preferences set?

H
Click to expand...

Thanks Hugh. The one thing I suspect is a third party NTFS driver. I am currently trying to disable that and see what happens.

File handling preferences - I've not changed anything........ what would I be looking for?

Ta.

Dav
 
FlyTVR said:
File handling preferences - I've not changed anything........ what would I be looking for?

Ta.

Dav
Click to expand...

The only real change in there is to change th cache size frm 1 to 20 gb. But that wouldn't affect this
 
Well, I've disabled the NTFS driver. No change. Tried LR4. Same deal.

Confused................
 
No real idea then, sorry. No help I know, but what happens if you restart rather then just disable to NTFS driver?
 
I have exactly the same issues. 16GB eaten away in my case. Just have to use FreeMemory app every hour or it is crazy.

I don't use any plugins or ntfs or anything extra on top of LR. But my catalog and my folders are huge. And I use a lot of grad filters, brushing, cloning etc - the two seem to be somewhat related to high memory. And it is well known recent OSX would keep everything in RAM until almost full
 
daugirdas said:
I have exactly the same issues. 16GB eaten away in my case. Just have to use FreeMemory app every hour or it is crazy.

I don't use any plugins or ntfs or anything extra on top of LR. But my catalog and my folders are huge. And I use a lot of grad filters, brushing, cloning etc - the two seem to be somewhat related to high memory. And it is well known recent OSX would keep everything in RAM until almost full
Click to expand...

Thanks for that! Just tried it and it worked.

I wonder if the OS uses some form of garbage collection and has a very low threshold? I'll have to keep an eye on this!

Cheers

Dav
 
When you close an application in OSX the memory used by that app is not immediately freed up. It's kept available in case the app is required again and the memory is then immediately available for it. This is known as inactive memory. If you need more memory and you don't have enough free memory, this will be taken from the inactive
memory pool

Doesn't make sense if you are coming from windows. It took me a while to get used to it.

See if you have a lot of inactive memory being shown. If so this is where the memory is going too
 
Chappers said:
When you close an application in OSX the memory used by that app is not immediately freed up. It's kept available in case the app is required again and the memory is then immediately available for it. This is known as inactive memory. If you need more memory and you don't have enough free memory, this will be taken from the inactive
memory pool

Doesn't make sense if you are coming from windows. It took me a while to get used to it.

See if you have a lot of inactive memory being shown. If so this is where the memory is going too
Click to expand...

You can see this effect by opening an application quitting it and then launching it again. The second launch will take a fraction of the time of the first launch because it still has the application in RAM.
 
Doesn't make sense if you are coming from windows.
Click to expand...
Yes it does, that exactly the same memory management process used in Windows 8.
 
redsnappa said:
Yes it does, that exactly the same memory management process used in Windows 8.
Click to expand...

My last experience with Windows was XP Pro so I'm a bit out of date with anything after that
 
Not an expert by any means but from what Chappers and Planky say it's not really "gone" and thus not a leak. Trick would be to open something else (that's also huge) after that 20GB 'leak' and see if it can't reclaim the memory.

It's only a leak if other apps can't re-use the cached memory - otherwise it's just the system being efficient.

Suggest photoshop and a really large image or two?
 
redsnappa said:
Yes it does, that exactly the same memory management process used in Windows 8.
Click to expand...
lol and how many people use that ;-) and of those how many would appreciate the technicalities of memory management...

Anyway as stated before, nothing odd happening here at all
 
I've been monitoring LR. Taking the Macs memory management into consideration, I still see LR performance degrade over the space of a day. There is something fishy going on.
 
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