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macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 26, 2005
321
0
Southampton UK
OK, not millions, but I just checked to see what my itunes is using and it's like 700MB - is anyone else's doing this? Is there a way I can get it down? I can't really have itunes using all my RAM - oddly enough I need it for other things!!
 
Well I'm guessing you have album grid view or coverflow view on. Neither of which you'll need to see while you're working with the other apps.

Mine hits about 650mb with coverflow, 600mb for grid view. ~ 270 albums.
 
OK, not millions, but I just checked to see what my itunes is using and it's like 700MB...
That's less than 20% of available RAM... OK 35% in your case. What's the big deal? Are you having excessive page-outs? If not, what difference does it make how much it uses? Buy more RAM if it's an ongoing problem.
 
I have no idea how you guys got it to such a high mark.

I opened it up with a playlist showing. 53MB. Went to the grid view with all of my albums. I think it went to 100MB. I'm now playing a movie from grid view while ripping a DVD using HandBrake. 116MB. Cover Flow view popped it up to 135MB. I'm using a 2.16MHz MBP model from early 2007. I wish I knew what to tell you guys, but it seems as if your systems are way outta whack.
 
I have no idea how you guys got it to such a high mark.

I opened it up with a playlist showing. 53MB. Went to the grid view with all of my albums. I think it went to 100MB. I'm now playing a movie from grid view while ripping a DVD using HandBrake. 116MB. Cover Flow view popped it up to 135MB. I'm using a 2.16MHz MBP model from early 2007. I wish I knew what to tell you guys, but it seems as if your systems are way outta whack.

It's mostly dependant on the number of different album art that is showing at a time. Most of my covers are fairly (relatively) high quality so 270 should take up a small chunk of ram (plus i think that iTunes converts all your art to .tiff, which is basically uncompressed, and stores in your iTunes folder).
 
That's less than 20% of available RAM... OK 35% in your case. What's the big deal? Are you having excessive page-outs? If not, what difference does it make how much it uses? Buy more RAM if it's an ongoing problem.

ok, not quite sure why the tone but does it really sound reasonable to you to buy more RAM for iTunes?

I found that starting itunes in the normal list view makes it use a reasonable amount, but I like the grid view :(
 
ok, not quite sure why the tone but does it really sound reasonable to you to buy more RAM for iTunes?

I found that starting itunes in the normal list view makes it use a reasonable amount, but I like the grid view :(
There's no "tone", only some valid questions, which you still haven't answered. What's the problem? Are you having excessive page-outs? Is your system running slow? Is iTunes preventing other things from running?

It's reasonable to buy more RAM if you're frequently multi-tasking or using applications that require more RAM. It's a matter of buying the hardware that best meets the demands you place on a system. iTunes, like many media-oriented apps, requires resources to run. We all have to take a look at what we use a computer for, and try to get the hardware and software configuration that meets those demands.
 
It's mostly dependant on the number of different album art that is showing at a time. Most of my covers are fairly (relatively) high quality so 270 should take up a small chunk of ram (plus i think that iTunes converts all your art to .tiff, which is basically uncompressed, and stores in your iTunes folder).

I just scrolled through all of my albums in grid view and it did jump to 270. So if he has twice as many albums as me, that's probably it. I had no idea that iTunes using TIF images. That seems kinda dumb since nobody's exactly doing high-quality printouts (that I know of).
 
The Solution for the OP:

Change to the list view with no album art. Restart iTunes.

In any case. If you started using coverflow/grid view, and your usage goes up. Changing back to a view with no art releases all the ram that was used by the album art.
 
I just scrolled through all of my albums in grid view and it did jump to 270. So if he has twice as many albums as me, that's probably it. I had no idea that iTunes using TIF images. That seems kinda dumb since nobody's exactly doing high-quality printouts (that I know of).

I think a correction is in order. I don't think they are stored as TIFF's.

But my Album Art folder in my iTunes folder is about 90 megs, so there is some additional memory used in some image conversion since the fully loaded coverflow increases ram usage by 300 megs. Most programs use a less compressed file format so it saves processing power when they are needed to decode the image.
 
There's no "tone", only some valid questions, which you still haven't answered. What's the problem? Are you having excessive page-outs? Is your system running slow? Is iTunes preventing other things from running?

It's reasonable to buy more RAM if you're frequently multi-tasking or using applications that require more RAM. It's a matter of buying the hardware that best meets the demands you place on a system. iTunes, like many media-oriented apps, requires resources to run. We all have to take a look at what we use a computer for, and try to get the hardware and software configuration that meets those demands.

yes, they were valid questions, which were sort of obvious from the outset. Obviously I'm experiencing problems otherwise I wouldn't have checked the RAM usage and then posted about it! iTunes isn't preventing other things from running but until yesterday, I could run Aperture and itunes at the same time, now my system comes to a grinding halt (if I opened itunes with grid view, or used grid view at all in my last session).

You're really quite patronising, aren't you? I'm fully aware that buying more RAM will give me more RAM. Again, I'm not stupid (which you seem to have just assumed!) and I know that it's better to have hardware to meet my needs, that's kinda why I have a brand new Macbook Pro anyway! Thanks for your help, though. Next time I need the blatantly obvious pointed out/reiterated, I'll be sure to drop you a line!
 
yes, they were valid questions, which were sort of obvious from the outset. Obviously I'm experiencing problems otherwise I wouldn't have checked the RAM usage and then posted about it! iTunes isn't preventing other things from running but until yesterday, I could run Aperture and itunes at the same time, now my system comes to a grinding halt (if I opened itunes with grid view, or used grid view at all in my last session).

You're really quite patronising, aren't you? I'm fully aware that buying more RAM will give me more RAM. Again, I'm not stupid (which you seem to have just assumed!) and I know that it's better to have hardware to meet my needs, that's kinda why I have a brand new Macbook Pro anyway! Thanks for your help, though. Next time I need the blatantly obvious pointed out/reiterated, I'll be sure to drop you a line!
  • It's NOT obvious that you're having problems from your post, only that you don't like iTunes using so much RAM. Many will look at Activity Monitor and question something they see there, even if they're not having a problem. You didn't state that you had a problem... only that iTunes was using "millions of RAM".
  • No one assumed, stated or even suggested that you were stupid. I asked questions to determine what your problem was, if any, since your original post didn't contain all the information necessary to determine that.
  • Since you prefer to "cop an attitude" and criticize those who are trying to offer you help, you can figure it out on your own!
 
yes, they were valid questions, which were sort of obvious from the outset. Obviously I'm experiencing problems otherwise I wouldn't have checked the RAM usage and then posted about it! iTunes isn't preventing other things from running but until yesterday, I could run Aperture and itunes at the same time, now my system comes to a grinding halt (if I opened itunes with grid view, or used grid view at all in my last session).

You're really quite patronising, aren't you? I'm fully aware that buying more RAM will give me more RAM. Again, I'm not stupid (which you seem to have just assumed!) and I know that it's better to have hardware to meet my needs, that's kinda why I have a brand new Macbook Pro anyway! Thanks for your help, though. Next time I need the blatantly obvious pointed out/reiterated, I'll be sure to drop you a line!

Okay, break it up you two.

Yes, programs will come to a grinding halt when all the ram is used up. Your hard drive will start running more because it is 'paging-out' which means it is using your hard drive as extra memory (swap space).

If my work around above doesn't work or you like using the ram hungry features of iTunes, you can resort to buying more ram. macsales.com has good deals.
 
OK, not millions, but I just checked to see what my itunes is using and it's like 700MB - is anyone else's doing this? Is there a way I can get it down? I can't really have itunes using all my RAM - oddly enough I need it for other things!!

I think he was asking for help.

That's less than 20% of available RAM... OK 35% in your case. What's the big deal? Are you having excessive page-outs? If not, what difference does it make how much it uses? Buy more RAM if it's an ongoing problem.

^ Tone setting at it's simplest.
 
I'm glad it wasn't just me that sensed a tone! :/ Not really what I'm after on a Sunday morning, if I'm honest.

Cheers sammich, like I said, I restarted with the list view and it uses a normal amount of RAM - bit annoying that it doesn't free it if you switch from grid to list view, but then I guess it's still early stages of the release. Hopefully stuff like this will be cleared up in future versions.

I plan to max the RAM on here, but not just now, and definitely not because of iTunes! Maybe when my Aperture library gets too big to handle.
 
The first time I ran iTunes 8 after upgrading it used something like 900MB of memory and my first thought was "memory leak" - it's not reasonable for an App such as iTunes to use so much memory.

I was concerned because I leave iTunes running all the time to feed my Apple TVs and even with 4GB RAM I didn't really fancy handing almost 1/4 of it over to a media player...

However, after a couple of days the memory used by iTunes has dropped to a more reasonable level (although still pretty high IMO) - I've just checked and iTunes is sat in Grid View and using 279MB RAM

So, it could be something iTunes does on first run that uses all the memory and that settles down over time. I'd still like to know why it needs nearly 300MB ram to run though!
 
The most I've noticed it using was 600MB when Genius was going through my Library.
Usually it's about 80MB in List view and 100MB - 130MB for Grid and CoverFlow.
 
I only have 256 mb of RAM, and it works just fine in list view with other things running, i.e, ichat, safari, and word. Coverflow is delayed in loading the album art, but, yeah only 256 mb of RAM.
genius is not on. uses 48mb, in coverflow playing music. i'm running 10.4.11
 
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