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pudge (1)

pudge
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Journal of pudge (1)

Thursday November 01, 2007
09:09 PM

Mac OS X Leopard, Memory, and helpdatad

[ #34816 ]

So my memory usage in Leopard is WAY down. I have Safari, DragThing, SSHKeychain, perl daemons, MySQL, Apache, MacCvsX, Eudora, BBEdit, iChat, Terminal ... a lot of things running. Before this would put me into swap. Now, it does not. Not even close: with 2GB total, I have about 700MB unused.

It's ... just wow. HUGE performance increases in Leopard for me, just by not going into swap. I think some memory leak was fixed, or something. I dunno. But I like.

The biggest new memory pig is "helpdatad." Open Activity Monitor, sort by RSIZE, go into the Help menu of Activity Monitor, type into the new "Search" field, hit return, and watch helpdatad climb to the top. 180MB without breaking a sweat.

I killed the process and vowed to never type into that field again.


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Mac OS X Leopard, Memory, and helpdatad 9 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Gah. I'm sorely tempted. I'm honestly just waiting for Camelbones to get updated and then I'll upgrade. But I'm still holding off spending that $150...
  • So, being the King of all things both Perl and Mac, tell me/us about your opinions of Perl in the new version. Are we finally on 5.8.8? Have they unbroken any of the broken stuff from Tiger?
    • Perl is 5.8.8. Apart from that, beats me. I don't use the system perl. :-)
  • You can dump sshkeychain. Leopard's got it's own now. (hint: sskc prefs, turn off it's environmental var creation, remove it from login-startup and logout and back in).

    I tried your example with helpdatad. I'm just not seeing it eat up the memory like that.

    But I too noticed the sweet difference in speed. I'm using a first-gen MBP 15" w/ 2GB ram and a dual G5 2Ghz w/ 3GB.
    • I am not seeing it all the time. Just sometimes.
    • Neat. I don't understand exactly how the ssh agent thing works though, which scares me. But I think I get the gist of it.
  • You mentioned perl, apache, etc. How'd you build your setup? Which Xcode do you have installed 3.0 or 2.5 or both?

    I'm seeing all sorts of weirdness w/ this upgraded 10.4 to 10.5 laptop (I have XCode 3,2.5, and used stock perl... ya, I know, I shouldn't have). make on slashcode dies terribly. I'm guessing I need to do a fresh install and swipe the /System/Library/Perl from it, and then go with all my LAMP devel stuff in /usr/local.

    • You mentioned perl, apache, etc. How'd you build your setup? Which Xcode do you have installed 3.0 or 2.5 or both?

      I'm seeing all sorts of weirdness w/ this upgraded 10.4 to 10.5 laptop (I have XCode 3,2.5, and used stock perl... ya, I know, I shouldn't have). make on slashcode dies terribly. I'm guessing I need to do a fresh install and swipe the /System/Library/Perl from it, and then go with all my LAMP devel stuff in /usr/local.

      I build all my own stuff (except MySQL, where I get a binary from mysql.com) and put it in /usr/local/. I don't use any stock stuff, except for the build tools from Xcode. It's been so long since I built this I am not sure what I used, probably gcc 3.

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