High RAM usage

[gyzerok]

Hello! How normal it is for BetterDisplay to consume so much RAM?

Perhaps that'd make sense with virtual displays, but I am not using any.

App version: 3.1.2 Build 34662 (by the way it'd be really nice to make this text selectable in the app or add a copy button)

[waydabber]

Not sure. The "Memory" is a kind of artificial number there and does not show actually anything (based on some metrics it is designed to give a sense to the average user about memory usage but can be misleading, I am not sure how it is actually calculated).

• What app features are you using?
• Can you show me more info for the process by enabling additional memory columns and show the Memory tab entirely so we can see the memory pressure - like this?

What really matters is real memory and private memory. Real memory is what the app actually uses from physical RAM. Private memory is the memory that is used by the app exclusively for it's own things - this is what the app should minimize in order to be efficient. Purgeable memory can be either purged (or moved to the disk) when there is a memory pressure situation and might just linger there when the OS has no reason to bother with it due to abundance of unused memory.

[gyzerok]

Yeah, seems like everything is fine with the real memory. Thank you!

As for the app features - dunno how to write the full list. I basically used BetterDisplay to configure everything about my external monitor - resolution, color profile, refresh rate and etc. Then I use configuration protection to keep all this settings in place.

[sky00high]

I am having similar issues. It is using a lot of memory. And it gets worse the longer the macbook air is opened. Could it be a memory leak?

[waydabber]

I don't think so, display disconnect/reconnect does not have much reason to take up memory space. But will continue to try to reproduce the problem. :)

[mortan]

Did this happen instantly after detection or after a while?

I did let the application run for around 24h. I will try to pin down the issue, but I think it‘s either because of the DDC stuff or because of display reconnection. My Mac Mini is connected to two monitors which are in turn also connect to a Windows machine. I switch the monitor input signal quite frequently between Mac and Windows.

[waydabber]

Are you using brightness synchronization and/or brightness upscaling on any of the displays?

[mortan]

The bug doesn't seem to happen with default settings. I reset everything again and let it run for around 2 days. I will let the app detect the DDC features again and see if that is the problem.

Are you using brightness synchronization and/or brightness upscaling on any of the displays?

I did indeed use the brightness slider in BetterDisplay for both the monitors.

[waydabber]

Ok, thank you!

I tried reproducing the issue on a setup with 2 external + 1 built-in display setup, doing various DDC detections, DDC operations, synchronizations of various kinds and could not reproduce the issue so far. I was able to raise the memory usage with native brightness upscaling enabled and the SwiftUI nits counter shown by constantly changing the brightness but after a while the memory got released again and things settled right back to the normal low memory usage pattern (I suspect it did not happen earlier simply because of the low memory pressure on the test computer).

So all in all, I was not able to reproduce the issue so far. It must be something very specific/obscure I guess.

[mortan]

@waydabber thanks for the reply. I will test it with a default config and report back tomorrow.