Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

HungrySeacow · Sep 12, 2006, 05:33 PM

Anyone else notice this? Apple raises the bar, now we need 4GBs of RAM just to listen to music

. No really.... I have less then 300MBs free of 2GBs of RAM.

baw · Sep 12, 2006, 05:42 PM

No big deal. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

HungrySeacow · Sep 12, 2006, 05:47 PM

Originally Posted by baw

No big deal. Free RAM is wasted RAM.

No, it is a bid deal when you close iTunes and you don't get that memory back. Not to mention that having 2GBs of RAM should allow you to use more then a small handful of programs before things slow down due to excessive swap file usage.

mduell · Sep 12, 2006, 05:53 PM

Free RAM is wasted RAM... how much is iTunes actually using?

I doubt iTunes has overtaken Firefox as the king of memory leaks... I'm at about 180MB with Firefox open for about 30 minutes and just 12 tabs.

porieux · 04:25 AM

...

HungrySeacow · Sep 12, 2006, 06:01 PM

Originally Posted by porieux

Does the OP know what 'memory leak' means? It sounds to me like you just think it's using too much....not the same thing at all.

A memory leak would mean it used more and more the longer you left it open until it finally just crashed from being open too long. (somewhat simplified but you get the idea)

I certainly know what a memory leak is, and yes, I think it certainly has one

Sitting there in the dock doing nothing but playing music and looking pretty, and having a huge snack

. Tell me, how big is your swap file? Mine is about 20GBs

Art Vandelay · Sep 12, 2006, 06:43 PM

After a few hours of running iTunes 7 through its paces, it's only using 91MB of RAM. That number isn't increasing either so I don't see a memory leak.

And I only have a single 64MB swap file. Are you sure you're not getting swap file size confused with virtual memory allocation? If you really have 21GBs of swap files, you've got a problem.

paul w · Sep 12, 2006, 07:36 PM

Holy crap mine's up to 498.10 mb, even though it's not even playing and is the mini player mode. WTF???

Actually since starting this post it's climbed to 498.13. Closing it made it jump to 503 and when it relaunches it quickly hits 44.78mb. Wow.

Eug · Sep 12, 2006, 07:38 PM

Thx for the heads up. I'm holding off for now.

TETENAL · Sep 12, 2006, 08:08 PM

Do you have third-party plug-ins installed?

paul w · Sep 12, 2006, 08:51 PM

Me? Not at all. It's currently at around 54mb - but still slowly climbing after virtually no usage.

Catfish_Man · Sep 12, 2006, 10:38 PM

Originally Posted by HungrySeacow

No, it is a bid deal when you close iTunes and you don't get that memory back..

If this is the case, then something is horribly horribly broken. Quitting apps should *always* release their memory. I'm not sure how one would go about writing one that didn't...

Art Vandelay · Sep 12, 2006, 11:29 PM

Or the OP is misunderstanding the difference between free memory and inactive memory.

Eug · Sep 12, 2006, 11:38 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Free RAM is wasted RAM... how much is iTunes actually using?

I doubt iTunes has overtaken Firefox as the king of memory leaks... I'm at about 180MB with Firefox open for about 30 minutes and just 12 tabs.

That's nothing, compared to Safari. I can get far above that with no tabs.

Art Vandelay · Sep 12, 2006, 11:49 PM

You'll be pleased to know that doesn't happen with Safari 3.

gametime10 · Sep 13, 2006, 08:08 AM

OSX is significantly more sluggish after installing iTunes 7 even, when its not running

jasong · Sep 13, 2006, 02:09 PM

iTunes is using 129.13 MB of real memory and 380.88 MB of virtual memory it has been playing constantly over Airport Express for the last 9 hours flawlessly. In that time I have also been updating ID3 tags and album art to work better with Coverflow. I've been watching the memory usage for the last 30 minutes and it hasn't changed any significant amount, in fact, the real memory has gone down a few times, but never above 129.14.

Nothing seems more sluggish than usual, other than me after 9 hours of reading ;-)

Thinine · Sep 13, 2006, 02:16 PM

It's not a leak, just caching of album art.

©öñFü$íóÑ · Sep 13, 2006, 02:24 PM

i remember when iTunes did it's thing on a Mac (and/or PC) with under 128MB of ram..... GOD i miss those days....

Catfish_Man · Sep 13, 2006, 02:47 PM

Originally Posted by gametime10

OSX is significantly more sluggish after installing iTunes 7 even, when its not running

Placebo, or it's running a background process that isn't quit, or spotlight is still indexing it. Code that's not running can't slow things down.

imitchellg5 · Sep 13, 2006, 02:49 PM

The new iTunes seems a lot faster to me than 6 did. It only uses around 35-38Mb of RAM on my iMac while on random.

Eug · Sep 13, 2006, 03:12 PM

Originally Posted by Thinine

It's not a leak, just caching of album art.

How much does it choose to cache, and when? If it cached EVERYTHING, that would be in the hundreds of MB for large collections.

Originally Posted by Art Vandelay

You'll be pleased to know that doesn't happen with Safari 3.

We need Safari 3 sooner rather than later, but unfortunately it seems to be Leopard only.

In the meantime we need a .x.x update to fix the showstopper bugs.

Originally Posted by �öñFü$íóÑ

i remember when iTunes did it's thing on a Mac (and/or PC) with under 128MB of ram..... GOD i miss those days....

As much as I hate memory hungry apps, I DEFINITELY don't miss those days.

brapper · Sep 15, 2006, 01:38 PM

Okay, my iTunes wont even start after a restart. It says "the iTunes app cannot be opened. There is not enough memory available."

Which is ridiculous. I have a gig or ram, this shouldn't happen.

Any ideas?

I mean, RIDICULOUS. I can load Photoshop and Dreamweaver at the same time, but iTunes wont load.

paul w · Sep 15, 2006, 05:58 PM

Actually iTunes has appeared to level off - there have been some other issues (with airtunes amongst other things) but it appears that after a minor scare, Safari retains the Memory Hog title.

Oh and Eug, on a whim I typed safari memory hog into google and the first result was: Safari is no longer a memory hog .

Good times, good times....

workerbee · Sep 16, 2006, 10:46 AM

Originally Posted by Thinine

It's not a leak, just caching of album art.

I think you got it right: iTunes 7 uses 43.83MB RAM when I open it with my 50GB music library, no problem here. Switching into Coverflow and scrolling through all my albums makes iTunes jump up to 385.34 MB RAM.

Mastrap · Sep 16, 2006, 01:38 PM

28 MB here, no issues to report.

Rodster · Sep 16, 2006, 02:09 PM

Wow maybe i'm lucky, my eMac has 1 gig of Ram. With iTunes7 running it's only using like 35 meg extra with iTunes7, Firefox and Safari running. These figures are based on stats from Activity Monitor.

So far no complaints with iTunes7, no mem leaks or scratchy sounds some have been reporting. I like the new look as well.

brapper · Sep 16, 2006, 05:25 PM

Seriously. My iTunes wont even start. Not enough memory - yet plenty for everything else.

I need a fix, 'cause I like my tunes, and I can't even get the program running.

awaspaas · Sep 17, 2006, 11:35 AM

Originally Posted by brapper

Seriously. My iTunes wont even start. Not enough memory - yet plenty for everything else.

I need a fix, 'cause I like my tunes, and I can't even get the program running.

Do you have UNO installed?

Apple - Support - Discussions - Not enough memory to run iTunes???!!! ...

Don Pickett · Sep 17, 2006, 08:46 PM

Originally Posted by paul w

Actually iTunes has appeared to level off - there have been some other issues (with airtunes amongst other things) but it appears that after a minor scare, Safari retains the Memory Hog title.

Oh and Eug, on a whim I typed safari memory hog into google and the first result was: Safari is no longer a memory hog .

Good times, good times....

Safari still has a very definite memory leak. Actually, from what I can tell it isn't Safari so much as it may be Webcore/Kit, because NetNewsWire has a memory leak as well.

iTunes 7 gives no problems here, tho. It's only using 33.9 megs of RAM after 4 days of uptime with lots of playing and flipping through album art.