Enhanced Dictation needs 973MB of RAM??? (GM build)

[fmillion]

So, OS 10.9 Mavericks GM build is working beautifully. However...

Take a look at that... The Dictation engine sucks up 973MB of RAM! On my Air with a measly 4GB of RAM, this is a huge problem. The smallest symptoms are occasional "lags" (beach ball or complete unresponsiveness of the kb/mouse for a few seconds); the worst (when using apps like VMware) is memory allocation failures. Switch off Enhanced Dictation and manually kill that process (it doesn't exit on its own!), and all that goes away - everything works no lags, no errors.

I discovered this because I was running my Windows 7 VM which I have set to use 1.5GB of RAM. On ML this has never been a problem at all - the RAM has always been managed very well. With ED on VMware actually ran out of RAM and had to force-shutdown my Windows VM. Now, with this huge elephant in the room, there's only a mere 1GB for the poor OS to live in - and even less when you factor in the kernel task and its use of RAM for video...

I hope this isn't a permanent design??? There's plenty of people out there with 4GB of RAM, and an app that you honestly will not be constantly using taking up that much RAM seems to be a huge issue!

Thoughts?

F

 

[w0lf]

Thoughts?

Don't use enhanced dictation or get more ram.

 

[fmillion]

Getting more RAM would be awesome, but, on the MacBook Air, Apple has seen fit to decide you don't need more RAM.

The fact that ED doesn't stop its own process when you turn it off is annoying. I could make a case for saying "turn it on when you need it, and turn it off other times". However, having to go to AM and kill the process manually just isn't good user experience design...

From the developer standpoint, I'm guessing what's happening is it's caching the entire data set in RAM - really not hugely necessary anyway, given the nice fast speed of modern SSDs. But either way, 973MB for a speech recognizer?...Wow.

Now I need to figure out a way to uninstall ED...If it's going to use up that much RAM it's not worth it also taking up a good gig or so of my precious SSD space... (Another thing that's always been iffy with Macs. Uninstalling apps = very easy, uninstalling system services = nigh on impossible unless you're a Unix geek..Which I am, so )

F

 

[irDigital0l]

You can turn dictation off.

At least for OS X 10.8.5

 

[fmillion]

It's not a 10.8.5 issue since 10.8.5 doesn't have ED.

I'm hoping it'll be addressed in an update at some point...

F

 

[treichert]

As you can see from the Memory Pressure diagram, it is not a problem.