Preview eating all memory

[NunoBerny]

Is it just me or is Preview eating up all the memory when I try to edit photos?
The system suddenly becomes very slow, with memory going "red".

It happened with a few photos, most of them quite small in size.

 

[Lordart]

I've recently got a new Mini-quad 2.3 and have 16GB ram ... but have noticed the same as you... start editing a small 700kb photo in preview and wow does it gobble up the ram and then virtual memory... here is a small video.

http://vid961.photobucket.com/albums/ae95/the7artist7/Memory-leak-HeavyTest_zps6f44d97c.mp4

If anyone has a solution it would be very appreciated - on my old 24" white iMac with 3GB ram Preview was perfectly fine to edit much larger photos without any slowdown...

Weird

 

[NoBoMac]

Not so weird. It's "saving" previous changes.

Redo the experiment, up-to some point, then start doing Edit > Undos and watch the memory usage start ticking backward.

Now, that said, I've noticed that iPhoto is bad at releasing memory, so wild guess here, Preview is sharing some of the same code for "Adjust Color..." and will be just as bad in not cleaning up after itself. So, will free up some of the used memory, probably won't get it all back. The more you work on, more memory will not be freed, so, good idea to maybe every now and then to quit/restart Preview.

 

[Lordart]

Thanks for the reply!

Hmm yes I completely understand that it would be saving each 'state' to allow undos.. but I just can't believe the sheer amount of memory that a single action needs to allow an undo... we're only talking about a 700kb photo and it's using anywhere between 300mb to over 1GB per action... does it really need THAT much!!?

Hmm and um so I tried your recommendation to watch memory when I undo any action.. err it doesn't reduce memory usage - it's increasing it!