Major Memory Leak Issue

[John Harris]

Hi, I'm experiencing a major memory leak in PM5 (latest version). As far as I'm able to work out the problem is caused by opening a contact sheet that has a large number of images in it (3000+). As soon as I open this in PM it takes about 2 minutes to completely eat through all my available memory (I use the Status Bar app to measure the amount of free memory I have & under 'normal' conditions i.e. with standard apps like mail, calendar, Safari etc open I have around 73-74% free). If I open PM with no contact sheet open it's fine & I've just opened a contact sheet with a couple of hundred images & it's sitting at 70% free and stable.

Yesterday I ingested a wedding containing about 3,500 RAW files & it's this contact sheet that I can't open without seeing the memory leak.

A couple of things worth noting that might be relevant: I recently upgraded my Mac to the latest 5k iMac. I had all my data on an external Thunderbolt drive so just had to install the applications on the new machine and then point my home drive to the Thunderbolt drive. I had some issues with Final Cut Pro X and had to delete my preferences to fix them. I've just dome the same thing with PM but it hasn't made any difference (apart from the fact that I can't now seem to register as it tells my my max number of activations has been reached - can you tell me how I can fix that also). I've reinstalled PM (although I was already running the latest version). I also noticed that if I open the troublesome contact sheet and then close PM it gives me a message that it's clearing the cache & this seems to take a long time.

Any ideas what's going on?

Thanks

[Hayo Baan]

Have you already checked the Activity Monitor application (in the Utilities folder) to see what process is causing this? It could very well be some other process and not PM.

[Kirk Baker]

John,

Hi, I'm experiencing a major memory leak in PM5 (latest version). As far as I'm able to work out the problem is caused by opening a contact sheet that has a large number of images in it (3000+). As soon as I open this in PM it takes about 2 minutes to completely eat through all my available memory (I use the Status Bar app to measure the amount of free memory I have & under 'normal' conditions i.e. with standard apps like mail, calendar, Safari etc open I have around 73-74% free). If I open PM with no contact sheet open it's fine & I've just opened a contact sheet with a couple of hundred images & it's sitting at 70% free and stable.

Yesterday I ingested a wedding containing about 3,500 RAW files & it's this contact sheet that I can't open without seeing the memory leak.

I'd like to see a screen shot of what is showing you that Photo Mechanic itself is using up all of the memory on your system.

A couple of things worth noting that might be relevant: I recently upgraded my Mac to the latest 5k iMac. I had all my data on an external Thunderbolt drive so just had to install the applications on the new machine and then point my home drive to the Thunderbolt drive. I had some issues with Final Cut Pro X and had to delete my preferences to fix them. I've just dome the same thing with PM but it hasn't made any difference (apart from the fact that I can't now seem to register as it tells my my max number of activations has been reached - can you tell me how I can fix that also). I've reinstalled PM (although I was already running the latest version). I also noticed that if I open the troublesome contact sheet and then close PM it gives me a message that it's clearing the cache & this seems to take a long time.

Activations: I suggest contacting our office.  They'll be able to tell you what systems you have that are still activated and how to deactivate them.
Cache clearing: If you have PM set to clear the disk cache on exit and you've browsed a large number of files, it can take some time to empty the cache.  This is normal.

-Kirk

[John Harris]

Hi Kirk I'm not really sure what's going on but all I can see is that with minimal applications open I have around 9Gb of memory used (out of 24) but as soon as I open a contact sheet containing 3000+ images this figure gradually climbs over the space of a couple of minutes to 15-20Gb. I also have an app called StatsBar which shows me in the menu bar how much free memory I have. This also drops gradually when I have that contact sheet open. It seems to stabilise at around 15Gb usage when I'm viewing the contact sheet but on Sunday when I was trying to import data it was dropping right down to the point that StatsBar was forced to keep cleaning the memory as it dropped to 0% free a couple of times.

I've attached a screenshot but I'm not sure it's going to help you that much??

John

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Kirk Baker]

Photo Mechanic is using a paltry 312 MB of your RAM.  Your system has not even swapped any memory pages out to disk.  Photo Mechanic has to read your images in order to show them to you.  The system caches disk reads and as you can see the File Cache is using nearly 7 GB of your RAM.

This is completely normal.

If your system needs to provide more RAM to applications, the File Cache will be dumped (the least recently accessed memory pages will go first.)

There is no memory leak.

-Kirk