iTunes keeps crashing on Snow Leopard

[Mikebike125]

I have a mid 2007 iMac with OSX 10.6.8 on it and I have the most current version of iTunes. Most every morning if not every morning, I turn on iTunes to download the latest News podcast and iTunes will crash. When my iMac comes out of Sleep mode, it backs up to my Time Capsule while iTunes is starting up. I have the basic FREE MEMORY app running and I can see the available memory continue to drop as iTunes goes through its "Delivering Results Genius thing" back to Apple. The memory quickly gets down to maybe 4 or 5 MB free, (yes MB) and then iTunes crashes. I don't know what is eating up all the memory and why it crashes. I called Apple and they had me reinstall iTunes and that does not seem to have helped. The only other thing they said to do is install Mavericks.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to fix this? BTW, I have 4GB of RAM. My iMac can only take 6GB max. Any ideas?

Also, if there is any bit of information that you might need to help me solve this, please ask and I will post it here. I don't want to post the 10000 lines of the crash report because I don't know what is important and what is not.

 

[Partron22]

You could try turning off Genius.

 

[Mikebike125]

I didn't think of that. I will give it a try and see how it goes. Possibly that is the problem.

 

[Mikebike125]

I turned off the Genius and although it didn't crash it used nearly all the RAM. I checked the Activity monitor and it is using 2.1 GB of ram just sitting there of Virtual memory and 1.22 GB of real memory.

Why so much? This brings my system to nearly a halt.

 

[Partron22]

My iTunes 11.1.5 is currently using 214.1 MB.
I've got library and home sharing off.
Everything in the Store prefs pane unchecked except "Limit Ad Tracking"
iTunes Match is Off, and I'm signed out of the store.
You aren't subscribed to a ton of podcasts, are you?

 

[Mikebike125]

I found that there were several podcasts that didn't have the auto delete on and had been building up for a while. One had over 1200 episodes that I had to delete. I now have the podcasts under control but it still seems to be using a lot of memory. I am going to try this out for a little and see how it goes. I can't figure it out but something in iTunes is using a lot of memory.

 

[Partron22]

Come to think of it, I've got iTunes 8 or some such running on an old (400MHz slot loading) iMac in the basement, and one of the biggest killers to keeping that running is the Smart Playlists. Live Updating is checked by default when you create a smart playlist; and that can get too resource intensive for a 400MHz machine.
If you have a pile of smart playlists, the icon looks like a gear instead of a musical note, try editing them to turn off live updating.
Toggling the live updating back on and then restarting iTunes will force an update to a smart playlist. That update smart playlist activity might be what's killing you.

 

[Mikebike125]

Well, I turned off the Smart playlists and it is still gobbling up RAM. You can see it go down every few seconds until it its just a few Mb and then it crashes. It indicates that it wants to download some new podcasts but then just sits there while the Ram fades to near zero and then crashes. I am stumped.

 

[Partron22]

What happens when you disconnect the Mac from internet and start iTunes?
Have you turned off "Automatically download new epsodes for your subscriptions" for podcasts?
Does the contents of your podcasts window match the files in "/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Podcasts"?

 

[Mikebike125]

What happens when you disconnect the Mac from internet and start iTunes?
Have you turned off "Automatically download new epsodes for your subscriptions" for podcasts?
Does the contents of your podcasts window match the files in "/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Podcasts"?

I will try this and see how it goes. I am also wondering if I stop the mac from doing the Time Machine back up while this is going on. I am not sure how much system resources the TM back up is using but all of it is going through the same CAT-5E cable at the same time. Possibly this is too much to do at once. I will try pulling the cable out and then waking up the computer and see if the RAM goes down to nothing or stays the same.

I'll report the results back after performing this test.

 

[Mikebike125]

I disconnected it from the internet and it still ate up a good amount of memory but not all. I then hooked it back up and it ate it all the way down to 6mb. I stopped it from automatically downloading all but three of the podcasts that I really listen to.

I checked in Finder and the podcasts in there did not exactly match what was in iTunes so I deleted some. I'll see what it does tomorrow morning.

 

[Mikebike125]

Well, I continue to still have this problem. I have narrowed it down to then iTunes is trying to update the podcasts. When it goes looking for the latest podcasts, is when the RAM gets eaten up down to nearly zero. It does not seem to have a problem when syncing the ipod, just getting the new episodes into ITunes.

Very frustrating.

 

[Mikebike125]

Here is an idea because I am so frustrated with this system problem and iTunes unsuccessfully trying to update my podcasts. This may be second nature to all of you computer savvy people but I don't know if this can be done.

Can I have my iPod just download the Podcasts straight to it and bypass iTunes on my computer? This would save me the frustration of having iTunes crash every morning.

 

[Mikebike125]

Looks like I may have a solution!!

Well, after much help from Partron22 (thank you for your efforts) I may have a solution and it is one that none of us had any control over no matter what we did. I was running the latest version of iTunes (11.2.2) with my updated Snow Leopard and having all these problems...........

Yesterday iTunes 11.3 was released.

No problems this morning

Got to hand it to Apple, they aren't perfect, but they do fix things and actually read those crash reports. Thanks Apple!

 

[Partron22]

Yesterday iTunes 11.3 was released.

No problems this morning

I wondered about that as I updated my iTunes yesterday.
Great news!

 

[Mikebike125]

I wondered about that as I updated my iTunes yesterday.
Great news!

What was really frustrating was that it used to work fine, then it just made a mess of things. I started writing pleas to the Apple people on the crash reports practically begging them to email me back about what to do. I was about to install Mavericks when I saw the update.

I'm still planning to install Mavericks but I have a whole bunch of .odt files from NeoOffice that I need to convert to .doc files before I lose that program.

 

[MCAsan]

I'm still planning to install Mavericks but I have a whole bunch of .odt files from NeoOffice that I need to convert to .doc files before I lose that program.

With Yosemite coming in around 8 weeks, why bother to do Mavericks at this late date? You have plenty of time to get ready for Yosemite.