24GB of ram and still issues..

[sahni130]

Hello, all.

So I have 24GB of ram in my iMac that i usually don't restartn, this time in about 42 days, since I bought it actually. however, I typically have about 11-12GB of ram still free and all of a sudden, everything froze and I was able to check iStat menus which listed Finder as using 99% of CPU and 10.85GB of ram and "kernel_task" as using another 6.84GB. The apps that i was using (Mail, PowerPoint, Word, Safari, Spotify, and Finder) all froze all of a sudden and the system was completely unresponsive. Before it froze, even with those apps opened, iStat showed around 12 GB of Ram free, so I'm wondering what the heck happened...why the heavy usage of cpu and ram all of a sudden? I do have dropox running in the background but I've had that on my MBP and other computers as well with no issues...

 

[melchior]

it is strange behaviour, without a kernal panic. microsoft office always feels like cruft to me, but that doesn't mean that was the cause.

i am assuming you have restarted now? you should check activity monitor if you can access it. if you can't access it, one tip for the future is to turn on remote access in the sharing panel of preferences. then you can SSH into your computer (from another computer) and run the command

top

to see what processes are doing.

if you restarted already you could look at the console for clues.

 

[sahni130]

it is strange behaviour, without a kernal panic. microsoft office always feels like cruft to me, but that doesn't mean that was the cause.

i am assuming you have restarted now? you should check activity monitor if you can access it. if you can't access it, one tip for the future is to turn on remote access in the sharing panel of preferences. then you can SSH into your computer (from another computer) and run the command

top

to see what processes are doing.

if you restarted already you could look at the console for clues.

I have indeed restarted and there is 16.8GB of Ram available even with the same programs open and "kernel_task" is now using 2% of cpu and 1.4GB of ram.