iCal memory leak on a G5 with 10.5.8

[Jethryn Freyman]

So, a few times I've suddenly had my G5 Power Mac, running Leopard, suddenly become very slow. Each time I opened Activity Monitor and got a surprise: iCal was for some reason chewing up 2GB+ of RAM. This has happened about half a dozen times over a couple of months. Not a huge problem, force quitting it and relaunching it makes things all rosy again, but it's a curious problem, and I've never had it on any other Mac of mine. Googling hasn't turned up anything.

A while ago I also had a problem with iCal beachballing for a few seconds every half dozen or so operations, but that hasn't happened for a month or so. iCal is the only app I've ever had either of these problems with, I've got a pretty vanilla OS X installation, and apart from these intermittent memory leaks things are running along buttery smooth.

 

[zen.state]

iCal is not really known as buggy so it could very well be something conflicting with it. Do you need to leave it running all the time? The more you multitask the more each app will slow down and do things like beach ball or cause apps to go into the not responding limbo you have going on here. I use iCal alerts for everything so there is no need to keep it running unless I am actually making an entry.

If you really like all that multitasking though then I highly recommend a memory upgrade. That is the best thing you can do to help yourself. I never like to have less than 1GB free myself as I get the best overall performance right in that buffer.

Hope that helps as it's hard to gauge all that could be wrong. How long do you normally go between reboots and also how long does iCal run at the extreme end of the scale for you uses?

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

iCal is not really known as buggy so it could very well be something conflicting with it.

Yeah I've never once had a problem on any other Mac, just this one. And this one runs everything else perfectly.

Do you need to leave it running all the time?

Sometimes, though when it happened to make me post this thread, it'd been only open an hour or two, and the computer had been on less than a day. The problem came back again today, iCal had been open less than an hour and was sitting idle, hidden in the background at the time.

How long do you normally go between reboots

Can be a day, can be a month, though I've had this problem happen after nearly a month of uptime, and I've had it after less than a day, so I can't see any relation there.

and also how long does iCal run at the extreme end of the scale for you uses?

Never, it uses about 60MB of memory, the only time it balloons out like this is when the problem occurs, all of a sudden it starts chewing up another ~40MB/second until the system starts paging like crazy.

When it happened today, this is all I found in the console for that time period:

27/10/11 10:30:18 PM quicklookd[2127] [QL ERROR] 'Creating thumbnail' timed out for '<QLThumbnailRequest /Users/Shared/Movies/asd.avi>' 
27/10/11 10:30:28 PM quicklookd[2132] [QL ERROR] 'Creating thumbnail' timed out for '<QLThumbnailRequest /Users/Shared/Movies/asd.avi>' 
27/10/11 10:30:30 PM /usr/sbin/spindump[2137] process 1967 is being monitored 
27/10/11 10:30:35 PM /usr/sbin/spindump[2137] process 1967 is being force quit 
27/10/11 10:31:13 PM kernel IOHIDSystem::relativePointerEventGated: Capping VBL time to 666669 (was 689246)

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I've googled form "capping VBL time" and I think that might shed some light on the problem, next time iCal starts molesting my system I'll see if it pops up in the error console again.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

OK, in case this helps anybody else...

I believe it's a problem with the iCalExternalSync process, it starts running wild with the CPU, as does iCal, and then iCal starts eating up memory. It also meant that I was unable to quit Mail, I had to force quit it.