Insane Kernel RAM Leak

[macsForLife]

So, I know I've seen stuff about this before on Apple's support page, but really all that ends up happening is a few people come on and insist that it's all in people's heads...clearly it isn't.

Ever since 10.9.1 I've had a crazy memory leak through the kernel...boots into about 750 MB dedicated towards it, and then proceeds to climb by about 1 MB a second indefinitely until it decides to level off at some crazy number. Eventually, it is up to about 5 or 6 GB, although once it didn't level off until about 9 GB. Now, sure, there is compression. But the machine is at a crawl by this point, and unusable. I have 16 GB installed. I never let it get to the point where it has to start paging, but it will get there unless I restart. In 10.8, I think I maybe restarted 3 times ever, and even in 10.9 it was only like, twice. Now, since 10.9.1, I've had to many times out of necessity just to make the machine usable again. The only third party kext is sound flower, can't quite seem to get rid of it but I have a hard time believing it's doing this. Otherwise, it's all stock stuff going on. Anyone have a clue what might be causing this?

 

[ElectricSheep]

Anything which runs inside of the kernel can be responsible for this. You will need to eliminate 3rd party kernel extensions (SoundFlower) and see if the behavior continues.

 

[Weaselboy]

Like ElectricSheep mentioned, first thing I would do is go to the folder below and delete that Soundflower kext then restart. If the issue persists, start activity monitor and look in both the memory and CPU tabs for anything chewing up resources.

Kernel task is not directly your problem. Kernel task is sort of the traffic police for system processes, and if you have a process running amok the result will often be kernel task showing high CPU/RAM usage. But that is just a symptom and not the problem.

/System/Library/Extensions

 

[macsForLife]

Thanks so much, makes sense. Nothing is using excessive CPU during this time...that's the strange part. It's purely a RAM issue. This often happens with total CPU usage totaling less than 10% total. Disk I/Os are also not excessive either.

Ditched the sound flower extension via Terminal, seems better for now. I rebooted right before writing the original post, after a few hours kernel RAM usage seemed to level off around 1.03 gigs, today it's risen up to 1.11, now seeming stable at that level. Guess I'll have to see how it goes from here.

Thanks so much guys, I appreciate it.