iTunes memory usage

[mknabster]

MY computer has been extremely slow lately, anything that has to do with graphics or my 2nd monitor has been very laggy and slow. Today, i just took a look at my activity monitor, and iTunes was showing the memory count of 1.39GB used. I don't think that's normal. I have seen it go up to 400MB, but never this much.

 

[GGJstudios]

MY computer has been extremely slow lately, anything that has to do with graphics or my 2nd monitor has been very laggy and slow. Today, i just took a look at my activity monitor, and iTunes was showing the memory count of 1.39GB used. I don't think that's normal. I have seen it go up to 400MB, but never this much.

High memory usage alone won't account for slow performance. At a time when you're experiencing the slow performance:

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

 

[mknabster]

All right, here are the requested screenshots. I know this wouldn't make sense if my memory was being used up to account for overall slow performance. But it does seem like ever since i downgraded from Lion to SL, there have been many things wrong. For example, in typing this message, me typing and actually seeing the words being typed out, there is a 2 second delay until when they show up on the screen. Other little things happen when i'm scrolling through web pages, they tend to lag a lot. Same with dragging windows to my external monitor, it's very choppy. Now for bigger processes, when i use Handbrake to encode movies or anything for that matter, it now takes 2x as long to do anything. Like to encode a 2 hour movie, it used to take 1.5 hours to encode. Now it takes 3+ hours to do.

[img=http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/9508/regioncapture1t.th.png]
[img=http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/3126/regioncapture2l.th.png]
[img=http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/8210/regioncapture3.th.png]
[img=http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/6597/regioncapture4.th.png]

 

[GGJstudios]

All right, here are the requested screenshots.

Your screen shots do not show the entire Activity Monitor window, as requested. Please re-read all the instructions and use the link in step 6 to upload your images to MR, rather than linking to an external site.

 

[mknabster]

Ok, well i hope these 2 are up to your specifications.

 

[GGJstudios]

Ok, well i hope these 2 are up to your specifications.

Much easier to read, thanks. It's not sorted by CPU as step 3 mentions, but I can work with this. You have had a small amount of paging activity. How long since your last restart? Also, have you tried quitting and restarting iTunes? If so, does it go back to near 100% CPU usage as soon as you launch it?

 

[Weaselboy]

MY computer has been extremely slow lately, anything that has to do with graphics or my 2nd monitor has been very laggy and slow. Today, i just took a look at my activity monitor, and iTunes was showing the memory count of 1.39GB used. I don't think that's normal. I have seen it go up to 400MB, but never this much.

It also looks like iTunes is hogging 100% of one CPU core in that screen cap. Something is definitely wrong with iTunes.

Did you change/add something recently with iTunes that may have caused this?

Do you have iTunes Genius turned on? If so, try turning it off.

 

[mknabster]

Much easier to read, thanks. It's not sorted by CPU as step 3 mentions, but I can work with this. You have had a small amount of paging activity. How long since your last restart? Also, have you tried quitting and restarting iTunes? If so, does it go back to near 100% CPU usage as soon as you launch it?

Woops, sorry about the 3rd part. I turn the computer off each day, so i turned it on this morning, put it into standbye, then have been using it for about 2 hours now. When i quit iTunes, it doesn't immediately get up to 100%, but after about 15mins of playing it gets right back up there.

Weaselboy, yes i have iTunes Genius and Push turned off. iTunes honestly has always done this to me, generally 400-600MBs is the normal running amount it uses; i have only seen 1-2Gbs a few times before.

But as far as it using one core of my processor, I have the Core2Duo by the way, is it possible the other core is malfunctioning? Because, like i said in my first and 2nd post, i have been having slowness issues across the machine in all programs, itunes is just something i use a lot.

 

[GGJstudios]

Woops, sorry about the 3rd part. I turn the computer off each day, so i turned it on this morning, put it into standbye, then have been using it for about 2 hours now. When i quit iTunes, it doesn't immediately get up to 100%, but after about 15mins of playing it gets right back up there.

Weaselboy, yes i have iTunes Genius and Push turned off. iTunes honestly has always done this to me, generally 400-600MBs is the normal running amount it uses; i have only seen 1-2Gbs a few times before.

But as far as it using one core of my processor, I have the Core2Duo by the way, is it possible the other core is malfunctioning? Because, like i said in my first and 2nd post, i have been having slowness issues across the machine in all programs, itunes is just something i use a lot.

Did you go through the performance tips that I linked in my first post? That may help somewhat. Your performance issue (at least going by your screen shots) is more due to high CPU usage than high memory usage. Is this the case with other apps? While you are paging out somewhat, it's not enough to cause severe performance issues. Keep an eye on CPU usage more than memory usage, especially with other apps you use.

I'd also recommend uninstalling your Avast antivirus. It doesn't contribute any protection that isn't already available by practicing safe computing, combined with the anti-malware already built into Mac OS X. The same goes for Little Snitch. Try running for a while with those two uninstalled and see what your performance looks like.

Mac Virus/Malware FAQ

 

[mknabster]

Yea i did take a look at the link for increasing performance. Now i didn't see any mentioning of Onyx, have you used that before? I use that every month to clean up the Mac, and it generally does a pretty decent job. I'll get rid of Avast that's actually something i introduced to my computer when Lion came out. I have been using Little Snitch for years and i know that doesn't bog down the computer, i have it running on all of my Macs.

As far as other applications, I generally can't run iTunes with Photoshop, because they both use a lot of RAM. PS will take up 2.5GBs on a good day with 100% CPU, same with my panorama software @ 100% and 1.5GBs. I actually tried installing Logic Studio 9 on this machine, and it literally couldn't even load the program, so i had to take it off.

 

[GGJstudios]

Yea i did take a look at the link for increasing performance. Now i didn't see any mentioning of Onyx, have you used that before? I use that every month to clean up the Mac, and it generally does a pretty decent job.

While OnyX is a reputable app, you don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Caches exist to improve performance.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

Five Mac maintenance myths​

 

[mknabster]

Yea I never really had a problem before with it being slow like this, but i'll keep that in mind from now on. Have any idea what i can do now though besides getting rid of Avast? Would it be a good idea to rebuild the OS?

Oh and one more thing to add, my Superdrive misbehaves too. It won't burn anything, but it will rip discs. it's interesting. Not sure if it's related at all.

 

[Weaselboy]

Weaselboy, yes i have iTunes Genius and Push turned off. iTunes honestly has always done this to me, generally 400-600MBs is the normal running amount it uses; i have only seen 1-2Gbs a few times before.

But as far as it using one core of my processor, I have the Core2Duo by the way, is it possible the other core is malfunctioning? Because, like i said in my first and 2nd post, i have been having slowness issues across the machine in all programs, itunes is just something i use a lot.

I doubt seriously one core of a CPU would die on its own. You have something wrong with iTunes and that is why it is chewing up all those CPU cycles.

Try rebuilding the iTunes library as described at the bottom of this KB article. Make sure you backup first.

One other idea... I see you have quite a few "helper" type apps running at startup. I'm wondering if one of those is causing a conflict with iTunes. Do a safe mode boot by holding the shift key as you boot up. That will prevent any login items (like Little Snitch) from starting. See if the iTunes problem goes away then?

 

[mknabster]

I doubt seriously one core of a CPU would die on its own. You have something wrong with iTunes and that is why it is chewing up all those CPU cycles.

Try rebuilding the iTunes library as described at the bottom of this KB article. Make sure you backup first.

One other idea... I see you have quite a few "helper" type apps running at startup. I'm wondering if one of those is causing a conflict with iTunes. Do a safe mode boot by holding the shift key as you boot up. That will prevent any login items (like Little Snitch) from starting. See if the iTunes problem goes away then?

Could it, by any chance, have to do with the amount of songs i have in the library? I have about 50.19GBs of music, which amounts to 6732 songs

 

[Weaselboy]

Could it, by any chance, have to do with the amount of songs i have in the library? I have about 50.19GBs of music, which amounts to 6732 songs

Nah... that would make it a little slower to launch, but that would not make it go nuts with CPU cycles like you are seeing.

Your Superdrive dying would not have anything to do with this that I can think of.

 

[mknabster]

Ok good, with the Superdrive. I guess i just need to watch the computer with what i have running at once.

 

[GGJstudios]

Could it, by any chance, have to do with the amount of songs i have in the library? I have about 50.19GBs of music, which amounts to 6732 songs

No, many have much larger libraries with no performance issues, (such as 30,671 songs, 173GB). If your library is corrupt in some way, rebuilding it might help, as Weaselboy suggested.

 

[mknabster]

Ok i'll give that a shot. Thanks for your time and advice guys, i really appreciate it!