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Bug #21: Synergy uses a lot of memory

Kind bug
Product Synergy
When Created , updated
Status closed
Reporter Greg Hurrell
Tags no tags

Description

From a user email: "The CPU usage is low, but I recently noticed that this thing eats more RAM than any other app I have running when I'm running iApps, Safari, MS Office, nothing really intense, but this app uses more physical RAM than anything other program, it comes in at a whopping 94 MBs of RAM (mind you that does not shift, it stays constant the entire time Synergy is running). Is this normal? I have a 1.5 GB of RAM, but it's strange to me to have an app in the background that eats more than 5% of my total physical RAM. This might be even an issue isolated to me, I don't know, but I couldn't find any other mention of this bug, so either it's not widespread or it's very well known and accepted."

94 MB sounds like an awful lot. What are you using to measure the usage? If I look at Synergy in "Activity Monitor" I see that it's currently using 10MB of real memory on my machine. Which compares favorably to other apps like iTunes (25MB), Activity Monitor itself (22MB), Mail (27MB), Finder (30MB), Safari (48MB) etc.

Having said that, Synergy *does* use a lot of memory, almost exclusively due to the fact that it caches the album art so heavily in memory. In Synergy Advance I am not making it cache so aggressively.

On the subject of memory leaks, I am not aware of any at the moment, but of course it is possible that somewhere in the 32,000 lines of code that there is a leak that has escaped my attention. I always fix leaks as I find them. I last conducted an extensive audit of the code prior to version 1.2 (released in August 2004).

http://wincent.dev/history.html

Comments

  1. Greg Hurrell

    Marking as ASSIGNED.

  2. Greg Hurrell

    1.5b should use marginally less memory, but only marginally. The bulk of the memory use is still attributable to album art caching.

  3. Greg Hurrell

    Version 1.6 fixes a few minor additional memory leaks. I've done extensive testing and analysis with tools such as the "leaks" command line tool and confirmed that the only remaining leaks in the app are Apple leaks in NSAppleScript, which are known to Apple and there's nothing that can be done about them. See:

    http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSAppleScriptMemoryLeak

    Luckily, the leaks in question are very small. Even after running Synergy continuously 24 hours a day for many days, the leaked memory is only a handful of kilobytes. The highest I've seen it go was just over a total of 70 kilobytes.

    I am going to mark this one as FIXED, as there really is nothing else that can be done to reduce the memory usage of the app. The copy of Synergy that's running right now on my machine is currently using just over 12 meg of physical RAM, which seems reasonable enough to me.

  4. Greg Hurrell

    Marking as CLOSED.

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