High memory usage after having a extened session

[ChihayaK]

I relized this problem when I forgot to terminate the asitop and let it run overnight. The next day I noticed that some program is using a huge amount of memory. After terminated the asitop it released nearly 15 gigs of memory. Is this the inteded behavior because of the nature of logging?

[tlkh]

Yeah it could be the case that the powermetrics process started by asitop could have been accumulating memory. I don't think asitop itself will use so much memory, it only logs maximum 30s of power information.

Although it is not intended, if the issue is powermetrics, I don't have a solution for that short of restarting the process at an interval of maybe a few hours.

[ChihayaK]

After read though the man page of powermatrics I think this could be eliminated by giving an -n argument to limit its periodic sample instead of the default unlimited samples. But I am just guessing, I will do some testing tonight.

[tlkh]

Yes, previously I had just called powermetrics with -n1, it was the most logical to me at that time. However, every time the powermetrics process starts and stops, there is a overhead that results in a performance hit (for example, if you are doing any form of benchmarking.

So probably there should be a kind of balance...