Disappearing Memory!

[Hansi R]

Hi Guys
About a month ago I bought a new 27 inch iMac... I installed a few apps, etc. including CleanMyMac3. Everything has been fine until this morning when, CMC3 opened up a pop down menu from the task bar informing me that I have run out of application memory! It gave me the advice to close any open apps and the option to force quit any open programs... I clicked on show more and I saw that my 8 gig of memory was on zero... I quit everything and closed any apps but it still showed zero. The only app still open was finder, so I relaunched it and Lo and behold my memory shot up to 6 gig... I kept my eye on this while I opened mail and everything remained okay. I tried the same with a few other apps and still everything remained okay. I then clicked on safari and, to my amazement I watched as those 6 gigs disappeared, chunks at a time, within about 60 seconds! The indicator bar turned from black to red and the warning message appeared once more that I have no memory... Once I had quit everything once again I tried relaunching finder again and, once again the indicator bar shot up to 6 gig again... As this is a new computer with hardly anything stored on it I still have 949 GB free out of the 999 GB... does anyone know what's going on? I have a call from apple scheduled for Monday but I thought I would ask you guys while I wait. It seems that it's only when I try to open safari that the memory disappears like water running down the drain... Thanks for any help or advice that you can offer, cheers John

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

A few questions:

-Is Mac OS X Yosemite up to date - i.e. 10.10.5?
-Does restarting your iMac help?
-Do you have any third-party Safari extensions installed such as AdBlock, toolbars, etc.?
-Have you tried another browser like Google Chrome or Firefox and does the issue persist?

C

 

[Hansi R]

Hi Cory
Many thanks for your response. Yes, everything is up to date and no, shutting down doesn't help at all... I do have adblocker installed, I managed to run this but it didn't find anything. I only have Safari installed so I haven't tried any other browser. I don't think I would be able to install anything at the moment because I only get about 60 seconds or so of incredibly slow internet using Safari before everything freezes and I receive the no memory warning. It's quite a shock to watch 6 GB of memory disappear in just 1 minute, I've never seen anything like this before... one thing that I didn't mention before is that I ran the maintinence section of CleanMyMac3 just around the time things started to go wrong, it's supposed to make things run smoother! Do you think that this could have changed something? Have you ever heard anything negative about CMM3?
Cheers, John

 

[honestone]

I've never used CMM, preferring to use Onyx and TechTool Pro for my disk cleanup/maintenance/repair tasks on both of my Macs. Each of them has only 4 gig of memory, and except for one somewhat recent incident when I contacted a strange virus on my MacMini (Macbook Air was OK), I've never had any issues, especially with memory.

I would suggest you first boot from the Recovery Partition and use Disk Utility from there tom"examine" your internal drive. That is, 1) do a Verify and Repair Disk at the Volume (ie, top) level, and 2) do a Verify and Repair Permissions, and a Verify and Repair Disk at the Partition Level.

If that does not help, not sure if the issue is related to any of your OS/OS-related software, or with your applications. The reason I say that is if you have been making frequent backups with Time Machine, it might be preferable to do a "Migration Assistant/restore" from the Time Machine backup made prior to the issue with CMM. I don't use Time Machine, preferring to use SuperDuper!, which makes a backup/clone of my entire "system". The issue I had (mentioned above) resulted in me 1) booting my machine form my most recent SuperSuper! backup, 2) Erasing, Formatting, and Partitioning my internal SSD with Disk Utility, 3) doing a fresh installation of OS 10.10, 4) apply the OS 10.10.5 Combo Updater, and 5) using Migration Assistant to "migrate" (copy) all the non-system stuff from the SuperDuper! backup to the SSD. When I restarted my Mac Mini from the SSD, things were fine, and have remained that way.