Possible memory leak, and other issues.

[tomster2300]

Problem 1

I had my Macbook's logic board replaced around a week or two ago due to a bad fan sensor, and have since experienced some additional problems after having it returned. Now, without fail, I seem to be losing free memory the longer my Mac stays on, despite being on or off the AC Adapter (that probably has nothing to do with it, but I thought I'd add it).

I only have a gig of ram, so after a fresh reboot istat pro will show roughly 500 mb's of free memory. According to my Activity Monitor Safari was using 190 mbs, and the only other program running is textedit (I forgot to look as to how much memory it was using). Despite only using these two programs, (even while closing textedit and / or opening various tabs & windows in Safari), my free memory will drop to around 22-40 mb's. Now, what in the world is eating up that much memory?

While writing this, I repaired my disk permissions and with Safari, textedit and the activity monitor open, I'm hovering around a constant 432 free mb's. I'm going to keep it on for awhile and monitor any changes that may occur.

Do you think repairing the permissions has fixed the problem? What is / was the problem?

Problem 2

I have multiple (3+) Dashboard clients running in my processes list for some reason. Is that normal?

Problem 3

The new logic board came with a new integrated N airport card, which gave me many problems the first couple of days after the repair. It was slow to connect to my home B wifi network, and also slow to connect to the university campus network as well. I erased then re-added both networks, plus refreshed the DHCP a number of times as well. The former did not do much, and the latter made it connect to the internet after having it refuse to connect for around five minutes. The network pops up in the top right-hand corner of the screen instantly when the computer turns on / awakens, but the internet is slow to load in both Safari and Firefox. I have both browsers and the Mac fully up-to-date.

Today it has been fairly quick on both networks, although the signal strength continues to be much weaker than before, and some pages take longer to load than they should. Should I take it back in for repairs and get them to replace the logic board once more?

Thanks to anyone who reads my entire post and offers any feedback!

 

[Sun Baked]

Seems the only two you missed were deleting the font caches/checking for font conflicts and running "sudo update_dyld_shared_cache"

 

[tomster2300]

Seems the only two you missed were deleting the font caches/checking for font conflicts and running "sudo update_dyld_shared_cache"

How do I do either of those?

**Update

It seems to still be losing free memory, just much more slowly now. Closing then reopening Safari put me at ~530 mb free, and after surfing these forums, closing / awakening the computer, then continuing to browse the forums I'm now down to 493 mb. Why is this doing this?

 

[ihabime]

Are you comparing your memory usage to the usage from before you had it fixed?

OSX will normally use up all the available memory as you use your machine, caching visited webpages and programs you run and quit in memory so they load faster the next time you access them. The labels in activity monitor are a little misleading, really anything not labelled wired is free memory. Free memory is memory that's never been touched, active and inactive are pools which contain running apps, apps you've quit but might launch again and various other quickly accessible caches. All of it is reusable, for active programs that will require the memory to first be stored to disk, but for inactive ones and caches the contents are discarded and the memory is instantly reused.

The Dashboard thing seems odd, I only have one copy in activity monitor even though i have two widgets up in dashboard, this seems like a change, because I recall the widgets being listed separately under tiger, are you on leopard? Are you running the widget on the desktop hack?

You could try killing the dashboard processes in activity monitor or deleting dashboards plist in your home directory

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist
and
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.client.plist

 

[tomster2300]

Are you comparing your memory usage to the usage from before you had it fixed?

OSX will normally use up all the available memory as you use your machine, caching visited webpages and programs you run and quit in memory so they load faster the next time you access them. The labels in activity monitor are a little misleading, really anything not labelled wired is free memory. Free memory is memory that's never been touched, active and inactive are pools which contain running apps, apps you've quit but might launch again and various other quickly accessible caches. All of it is reusable, for active programs that will require the memory to first be stored to disk, but for inactive ones and caches the contents are discarded and the memory is instantly reused.

The Dashboard thing seems odd, I only have one copy in activity monitor even though i have two widgets up in dashboard, this seems like a change, because I recall the widgets being listed separately under tiger, are you on leopard? Are you running the widget on the desktop hack?

You could try killing the dashboard processes in activity monitor or deleting dashboards plist in your home directory

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist
and
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.client.plist

I am running Leopard and six widgets. I'll try killing the dashboard processes and see what happens.

**They don't stop despite quitting them in the activity monitor. I did find this upon a google search. This could be the reason as to why there's multiple ones.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/dashboard-dev/2008/Jan/msg00009.html

 

[tomster2300]

bump

 

[Sun Baked]

Go to manage widgets and uncheck all the ones you aren't using.

I'm only using the ones that came with the OS, and they do not show up in activity monitor as meaningful consumers of resources.

 

[tomster2300]

Go to manage widgets and uncheck all the ones you aren't using.

I'm only using the ones that came with the OS, and they do not show up in activity monitor as meaningful consumers of resources.

Well I did a format of the hard drive and reinstalled Leopard, and the wifi seems to be working better. The expose animations are still kind of choppy (spaces at least), but after seeing all the forum posts about people experiencing the same issue, I can at least be assured that it's not just my computer.

I haven't done any updates yet, and I have a question. It wants to auto-update the Mac from 10.5 (that's what it says) to 10.5.4. I read that there was a graphics update issued in 10.5.2 that tried to address the choppiness issue with the x3100 chipset. Is that true, and if so, would I be getting it by updating straight to 10.5.4? It shows a few updates before the .4 one in my list, but they're for numerous programs and utilities and not major OS updates.

Thanks everyone for your help so far!