OneDrive is using 30 GB Memory on a Mac with 8 GB RAM

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

tl;dr OneDrive is making my Mac extremely slow, is there any way to make OneDrive work properly on Macs?

Due to company (school) policies based on GDPR rules, we are forced to use OneDrive for all files that contains student information.

Now, I do agree, in principle, that we should keep student information (and other stuff) safe, but I'm very sceptical about using OneDrive which, traditionally, have been performing really poorly on Mac. And even if most of our faculty are using Macs, minus some programs (like IT and 3D/games), but the administration is "in love" with Office 365, including Teams and OneDrive and want us to use that.

So, I was beginning the new semester yesterday by, migrating all school/class related files to the OneDrive directory on my Mac to sync it to the MS Cloud. Most of it resided in iCloud or Dropbox and have been syncing happily and safely for ages, but early on I got one zillion Sync Errors. It seems there is a lot of characters that iCloud and Dropbox (and GitHub) are fine with that are deemed "dangerous" by Microsoft...

Now, about 30 hours after the sync started with 10GB stuff, it still has about 6GB left to sync, and it keeps logging out of my OneDrive account every hour or so. And to make matters worse OneDrive is slowing my Mac to a grind by taking up about 30 GB (!) of memory (on a Mac with 8 GB RAM), constantly accessing a hefty 15 GB Swap disk. (See screen shot below.) All other apps (and I've reduced open apps to Safari, Pages and Music) are sluggish as ... well a slug.

I'm guessing I'll have everything up and running by Friday, and then I can start using the machine properly again.

Now back in the middle Ages (pre OS X) you could actually pull up the Get Info window on Apps and restrict how much RAM it was allowed to gobble up. That would have been very handy right about now, but I don't think that is possible anymore?

Any other - with OneDrive experience - that can help me make the app more, shall we say, well behaved?

 

[mj_]

I can't tell you what exactly went wrong but something is definitely messed up big time on your end. I've been using OneDrive and OneDrive for Business simultaneously on my Mac for quite a while now and have never seen anything like this. And both my shares are much bigger than 10GB although I keep most of my files in the Cloud and only download them on demand. Maybe you'll just have to wait for it to finish up its initial sync and it'll sort itself out after that.

What kind of internet connection do you have? 4 GB in 30 hours averages out to around 40 KB/s, which is fairly slow. Do you happen to have an upload limit configured somewhere? Are there several people on your network?

 

[ItWasNotMe]

Question - are you still copying files into the OneDrive folder structure?

There was a time, and it may still be the case, that it really didn't like it when you did wrote faster into the folder structure faster than it could upload. Each new file meant a scan of the whole folder structure (not a joke) so it spent all its time rescanning, CPU and memory use went through the roof and uploads barely happened.

Better to either dribble the files in waiting for it to be inactive, or to stop it, do all the file copies and then let it rip.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Question - are you still copying files into the OneDrive folder structure?

There was a time, and it may still be the case, that it really didn't like it when you did wrote faster into the folder structure faster than it could upload. Each new file meant a scan of the whole folder structure (not a joke) so it spent all its time rescanning, CPU and memory use went through the roof and uploads barely happened.

Better to either dribble the files in waiting for it to be inactive, or to stop it, do all the file copies and then let it rip.

There is a LOT of files in there (most of them tiny), in a complex structure, 60.000+ files, so it would take me for ages to go through and upload one folder at the time... but now - after the last login (I was of course signed out during the night) - it seems to have sped up a bit. The last half hour it has uploaded over 2000 files/1 GB in "just" half an hour, so it might be speeding up... *he said overly optimistic*

I can't tell you what exactly went wrong but something is definitely messed up big time on your end. I've been using OneDrive and OneDrive for Business simultaneously on my Mac for quite a while now and have never seen anything like this. And both my shares are much bigger than 10GB although I keep most of my files in the Cloud and only download them on demand. Maybe you'll just have to wait for it to finish up its initial sync and it'll sort itself out after that.

What kind of internet connection do you have? 4 GB in 30 hours averages out to around 40 KB/s, which is fairly slow. Do you happen to have an upload limit configured somewhere? Are there several people on your network?

We have a steady, reasonably fast 50/50Mbps so the speed shouldn't be an issue.

So I think ItWasNotMe is closer to it, but you're maybe right that - once it's up and running - it will behave much, much better, as long as I just touch a few files at the time.