Finder eats up memory

[monokakata]

This morning I noticed that Finder had claimed about 30 gb of my iMac Pro's 64 gb RAM.

I know Finder does that, and I know how to reclaim that memory if I want to. But this is a lot more than I'm used to seeing.

Mainly I'm curious as to what triggers it.

In today's case, there were no new drives to index, or anything like that.

 

[Gregg2]

I found this using Yahoo! in a matter of seconds:

https://paradite.com/2017/01/31/reduce-macos-finder-memory-usage/

 

[monokakata]

From your link: "It turned out that “All My Files” is consuming a huge amount of memory. The reason for the high RAM consumption is probably due the indexing and thumbnail generation process, which can be heavy if you have large number of files or high-resolution RAW footages."

Thanks, but as I pointed out, there was no indexing happening.

And I never have "all my files" on the sidebar.

If I didn't make it clear -- for me, this is not a big deal. I know how to stop it when it happens, and I have plenty of RAM. I was just curious about the triggers, and thought it more likely that somebody on MR would know.

 

[bigddybn]

Are you actually having a performance problem? OSX makes an effort to use every bit of RAM that is has available. I don't pretend to be a member of the Finder programming team but caching frequently used items into memory for quick access sounds exactly like something that OSX would do. If something else needs the memory it's very good about releasing it.

 

[monokakata]

I'm not having performance problems.

I like it when OS X uses my spare RAM as a cache, as you say, but when it does that, it identifies that usage as "cache." Right now, that usage is sitting at about 17 gigs.

When Finder was grabbing 30 gigs, there was very little room for cache.