Handbrake and your Memory? / Cpu Usage

[iOrbit]

whats your memory like when using handbrake?

for a long time i've been using the purge command to clear the inactive memory back to 'free'.

i wanted to know - am i supposed to do this? is handbrake supposed to turn all of my 16 gigabytes of ram into 'inactive' memory??

before i owned an SSD my mac would get very sluggish, almost unusable when it would page out and swap, so ever since then i always purge or restart if my system has been swapping (say overnight handbrake).

is there a way around this to stop this inactive memory build up??


second question is about CPU usage - i've heard theres a way to 'throttle' it down - does anyone know how to do that? and can they tell me what their experience with is like?

does it make handbrake less stable, or perform significantly slower?
has it ever caused corruption or failed encodes?

i hope someone will reply, thanks for replying in advance.

 

[Dalton63841]

Memory cleaners are a waste. Mac handles its memory perfectly well. Remember, free memory is wasted memory.

Handbrake likes to saturate every bit of resources it has access to.

 

[iOrbit]

Memory cleaners are a waste. Mac handles its memory perfectly well. Remember, free memory is wasted memory.

Handbrake likes to saturate every bit of resources it has access to.

i agree with concept, if only my mac didn't take a performance hit.

 

[Mac Eagle]

Hey iOrbit - I recently noticed that handbrake was doing this (using up all available free memory and it becoming Inactive memory) and I have used a Memory Cleaner to put the memory back to free, but it quickly goes back to Inactive. I have not noticed that it makes much of a difference to system performance to perform the memory cleaning.

I have not tried to limit Handbrakes CPU usage as I usually encode when I don't need to use the system. Even if you did reduce the CPU usage, this would directly impact the performance of Handbrake and would extend your encode times. Though I guess if you wanted to keep maybe 25% of your cpu output for other tasks, that may be worth being able to use the system while still getting some encoding done.

 

[paulrbeers]

i agree with concept, if only my mac didn't take a performance hit.

Really? Never noticed a performance hit due to handbrake taking all of my memory. It takes up all available and puts it into inactive. That just means if I open something, it dumps the handbrake "stuff" and uses that memory. You can clear your inactive memory with a simple command if it really bothers you by simply typing "purge" into terminal (with out quotation marks). I've done this just out of curiosity while Handbrake was running and while it did clear the inactive memory, there was no "boost" in system feel (although it didn't feel sluggish anyway).

Are you sure the performance hit isn't due to the hard drive and CPU being pushed? Are you using an SSD? I think it's either the system being pushed/maxed (especially the hard drive) or it is a placebo effect.

 

[iOrbit]

Really? Never noticed a performance hit due to handbrake taking all of my memory. It takes up all available and puts it into inactive. That just means if I open something, it dumps the handbrake "stuff" and uses that memory. You can clear your inactive memory with a simple command if it really bothers you by simply typing "purge" into terminal (with out quotation marks). I've done this just out of curiosity while Handbrake was running and while it did clear the inactive memory, there was no "boost" in system feel (although it didn't feel sluggish anyway).

Are you sure the performance hit isn't due to the hard drive and CPU being pushed? Are you using an SSD? I think it's either the system being pushed/maxed (especially the hard drive) or it is a placebo effect.

well, i'm using a SSD drive and 16 Gigabytes of ram. usually, if it starts paging out, performance remains the same, but if open another app, page outs just go higher, inactive memory doesnt free up. eventually swaps begin and thats when the performances drops and responsiveness goes way down

 

[glenthompson]

I only use Handbrake occasionally and have never noticed memory problems. It does ax out my CPU when running. With 8gb the only time I see page outs is when running Parallels and Windows.

 

[forlovehq]

agree.It does ax out my CPU when running. With 8gb the only time I see page outs is when running Parallels and Windows.

 

[kirsch92]

I had this same problem ever since Handrake became a 64 bit only app. Can't remember which version that was that did that, but I think it was about the same time I installed ML on my machine, so I was never sure who the culprit was.

I'm using a 2008 imac 2.8 C2Duo with 4 gig of ram which didn't help the situation either. Handbrake has always maxed out the CPU's, but RAM usage was never a problem until my "upgrades".

Under activity monitor, Handbrake was using less than 400mb during encode, but I could watch inactive RAM climbing until there was nothing left. I encoded from a Mac DVD Ripper Pro ripped dvdmedia file on my local drive to an external firewire drive, and encodes were taking 24 hours, and the machine was useless for anything else.

I'm think I'm probably blabbering on with details that don't really matter now.
What I want to say is the problem disappeared when I installed HB ver .9.9

Whether it was something HB changed, or whether it was the fact I started using the newest ATV3 preset at the same time I have no idea. But my encodes are back down to under 3 hours, and HB does not seem to be affecting inactive RAM.

If you haven't installed the latest HB, do so. And maybe start playing with your presets.

 

[dynaflash]

HB *will* soak all of your cpu cores. however 4Gb of ram is more than plenty for HB. You should not be running out of ram running HB unless you are way low on ram ( basically 2GB or less). inactive ram does not mean its not available for other processes.

 

[kirsch92]

inactive ram does not mean its not available for other processes.

I would agree, except Mountain Lion seems to think I prefer never ending beach balls and 600,000 Page Outs to actually releasing Inactive RAM. Nothing a restart won't cure, but I sure hope Mavericks cures it permanently.

 

[Dannel]

Just use Handbrake sometimes, did not pay much attention to this...