What is mdflagwriter, and why is it using over 2 GB RAM?

[smorris]

I have a late 2011 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM. I've been running Mavericks for a little over 3 days now, and have mdflagwriter as my largest user of RAM, consuming 2.04GB. This is followed by kernel_task at 1.12 GB and com.apple.IconServicesAgent at 679 MB.

I know the kernel_task is the OS, and attributed to root, but the other two list me as owner. What are thy, and why so much RAM? With only 5GB free on a 16 GB machine and half a dozen applications running, I can't see how 4 and 8 GB machines function! Is this all part of the application compression?

Thanks,
Steve

 

[benthewraith]

I have a late 2011 27" iMac with 16 GB of RAM. I've been running Mavericks for a little over 3 days now, and have mdflagwriter as my largest user of RAM, consuming 2.04GB. This is followed by kernel_task at 1.12 GB and com.apple.IconServicesAgent at 679 MB.

I know the kernel_task is the OS, and attributed to root, but the other two list me as owner. What are thy, and why so much RAM? With only 5GB free on a 16 GB machine and half a dozen applications running, I can't see how 4 and 8 GB machines function! Is this all part of the application compression?

Thanks,
Steve

Mavericks hogs a ******** of ram and releases or back when an app uses it. I have 8 gb and haven't paged out yet with 20 tabs open and watching band of brothers

 

[smorris]

mdflagwriter is now up to 2.76 GB, with the other two up to 1.08 GB and 797 MB. No one knows what the mdflagwriter i, or why it continues to grow?

 

[adamneer]

if you just installed Mavericks, i believe what you are experiencing is the system cacheing and indexing all of your files. I noticed the mdflag process eating system resources when i first installed Mavericks just like you are, but it goes away eventually when it is finished indexing.

 

[matthewscott661]

mavericks also allocates memory differently, so the however many GB it says is "used" is usually going to be whatever amount of memory you have installed. i have 8GB and it always says 7.7GB used (since 288mb goes to the integrated graphics)

 

[smorris]

No, it isn't a brand new install. It has been running for 4 days 16 hours, so it should be done indexing.

mdflagwriter is up to 3.03 GB this morning. 16 GB installed RAM, and Activity Monitor says 12 GB is being used. It says no swap files, but I hear the hard drive churning all the time, even thigh I'm not using anything that has to do with writing to the drive.

I get the spinning beach ball for 2-3 seconds when I click on a menu or when changing to an open application I haven't used for a while. That must be the memory compression thing doing its thing, but I'd much rather it open immediately like it did on Mountain Lion.

The FreeMemory application says it is using 8.77 GB active and 1.62 wired, but I don't know if FreeMemory has been updated to work with Mavericks' new memory scheme

It was over 2 GB the first couple of days after installing Mavericks, so I re-booted then. It has climbed ever since.

Under Mountain Lion, using exactly the same applications daily, I would rarely see less than 8 GB of free memory. Now with all this fancy memory conservation stuff, I'm rarely seeing more than 5 GB of free memory...

Steve

 

[Bear]

mdflagwriter is up to 3.03 GB this morning. 16 GB installed RAM, and Activity Monitor says 12 GB is being used. It says no swap files, but I hear the hard drive churning all the time, even thigh I'm not using anything that has to do with writing to the drive.

What size and type of disk do you have in the iMac? You may have run into an indexing buy. My suggestion would be to rebuild the index on the drive following the steps in Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes with the addition of restarting your computer between steps 5 and 6 to reset the mdflagwriter process. It will take a bit of time to recreate the index, but should clear up your issue.

The FreeMemory application says it is using 8.77 GB active and 1.62 wired, but I don't know if FreeMemory has been updated to work with Mavericks' new memory scheme

Activity Monitor will show you the memory usage breakdown. And it shows all the details of memory usage not just what FreeMemory may show.

Under Mountain Lion, using exactly the same applications daily, I would rarely see less than 8 GB of free memory. Now with all this fancy memory conservation stuff, I'm rarely seeing more than 5 GB of free memory...

Ignore the usage as long as you're not using swap space on disk. Just focus on the real issue. For the 2 days I was on Mavericks I pretty much had all 8GB of ram in use but no swap space usage. Under 10.8.5 I have about 600MB of swap spaced used right now. Mavericks memory management is much better.

 

[smorris]

Thanks Bear,

I've followed the instructions and Spotlight is rebuilding again. Says about 7 hours. I have a 1 TB WD 7200 RPM hSATA drive, the standard drive for the 27" 2011 iMac. I have three external Firewire drives, but have them ignored by Spotlight.

We'll see if mdflagwriter gets up there again. It was at 3.27 GB before I restarted, and I showed 3.X GB free RAM. It is only at 6 MB now a few minutes after restarting.

Maybe it isn't concern, but I was surprised not to see any comments on it being by far the highest RAM user.

Thanks for your suggestions,
Steve

 

[bossfo]

mdflagwriter

i am also getting mdflagwriter as a large consumer of memory, and I do not have Mavericks, so trying to figure out why? any thoughts? As of this post its consuming 447.2 MB and is the 2nd highest memory user after kernel_task