Memory leak? Sluggish...

FotoMagico
1

I’ve been working on a slideshow that my wife and I are presenting in a week of our trip to Greenland and Iceland. So far, 451 slides, 18 audios, 1 video, multiple transitions, pans, zooms, about 50 minutes long. This is the first serious use of FM4 since I started using the beta release, and I’ve been using the latest versions as they are released (I just saw there’s a version 4.0.3 out today, so I’m going to go grab that!)

I’ve noticed a considerable slow down in performing other tasks on my MacBook Pro, 2.8GHz Intel core i7, with 4GB internal memory while FM4 is open.

If I check my mail, it takes a substantially longer time for mail to appear than with FM4 not running. Same if I head off to Safari to check on something. If I want to open an image I have in FM4 to make some changes, using Photoshop CS6, PS is extremely slow (selecting tools, making selections, etc.) When FM4 is closed, things are back to normal.

I can understand FM4 requiring quite a bit of memory to perform, but sometimes it just seems to be hogging memory and not letting other apps run efficiently.

Any insights from others? Anybody noticing any performance degradation on their systems? Anybody at Boinx have any ideas (short of NOT going to Mail, or NOT using Safari, or NOT using PS CS6 while running FM4).

2

I am sorry to hear that FotoMagico is causing you problems.

FotoMagico 4 is optimized to perform its task as well as possible. For this, it uses as much as possible and as little as needed. Mac OS X is designed to provide each app with as much memory as needed. If an app uses more memory than is physically available, the memory gets “swapped” in and out to a file on disk as needed. This slows down all the apps considerably. You will notice that FotoMagico also runs slower when you open a lot of large raw files in Photoshop at the same time.

A memory leak occurs when an app does not release the memory it is no longer using. You can observe two things when an app is leaking: It’s use of memory increases over time even if you do not edit or add new things to the documents and your available memory stays low (and the other apps stay slow) even when you quit the app that’s leaking.

Currently, FotoMagico uses up to 4GB of RAM, so it will help considerably to upgrade the RAM of the MacBook Pro (if that model allows for it) to 8GB or 16GB.

3

Thanks, Oliver – not “exactly” the answer I was looking for, but at least it was honest :wink: My MBP can be upgraded to 8GB max. It would be nicer if there was only 1 4GB module installed, then I could just add another (not exactly sure if it requires both slots to be filled at the same time, regardless). The way it is now, I’d have to swap out 2 2GB modules and replace them both.