I say potential, because I’ve not ready anything about it elsewhere yet. However, I can reproduce it nicely on my Mac mini with 16GB RAM onboard.

I’ve been painting an adjustment layer (only Curves) onto my images in Aperture. I noticed yesterday that the software was starting to slow down. Then, the Force Quit window opened:


Yikes. Further investigation in Performance Monitor shows that 16GB RAM has been consumed, and that there is a lot of memory pressure. When I quit Aperture, that RAM is all reclaimed and things settle down:


You can see in the second screen shot where I quit Aperture, and the massive drop in memory consumption.

Now, I’ve not seen this before, so I can only assume that there is a problem in Aperture 3.5 and/or Mavericks. My advice - quit often. That seems to keep the problem at bay.

Hmmm. I'm not sure this defines a memory leak per se, at least not in the way a coder uses the phrase. It just shows that Aperture is grabbing all the RAM it can get it's hands on. That's not unusual behaviour from professional software applications (it's bad coding, but it's not actually a bug). It could be 'performing as intended'. I think you'd have to look at how Aperture dealt with memory as you were using it. Does it grab it all straight away? Does it grab RAM in a rational way as you're asking it to do things? If you start it up and then leave it and it's gradually eating up RAM while idle, that would be a better indicator.

The only actual way would be to use the tools that come with XCode to see if the app is grabbing & releasing memory when it should and that the OS's garbage collection system is handling it to give it back to the system free pool. Not sure you can do that on a release version of an app, to be honest.

To be honest, it's generally not a good idea to leave massively memory-hungry apps running for extended periods anway. Depending on how the OS deals with memory allocation, having a big lump of RAM 'locked' for a long time can lead to slowdown as the system has to keep dealing with that fact.

Well firstly it seems that Aperture may not be the culprit, but possibly a trigger. It seems to be triggering a massive uptake in Kernel Task when running though, which drops massively when the app is quit.

Other potential memory hogs (Final Cut Pro X) seems quite stable. However, when running Aperture, you cans EE the memory stress increase as I paint layers. That stress doesn't go down when I leave Aperture to rest (ie doing nothing), which makes me think it's doing something to cause Kernel Task retain it.

So not sure what the issue is here. I have been reading reports from other users that sound familiar - other apps can cause RAM use to increase. So not sure now.

I think it may be something hinky in the Library. I’ve repaired the database, remissions and rebuilt it and that seems to have made a bit of a difference. You do have to expect memory to be used up, but not to the point where applications start to shut down.

The next option is to make a new library and import the old one into it. Apparently, that’s the best option for a complete clean out, but it takes a long time to do.