iTunes' New Memory Leak
Apple just announced a whole slew of new products, include a new iTunes which includes a feature I've been drooling over ever since I first saw it on a Mac: CoverFlow. For those who haven't seen it, CoverFlow is a very pretty way of displaying all your digital music by album by animating it as a long stack of album covers:
You can scroll through them with a nice animated effect, all very pretty. Recently, Apple bought CoverFlow, and just today, re-released it in iTunes 7.
Wanting this super-cool (but ultimately useless) technology, I downloaded and installed iTunes 7. As soon as it was finished installing, I opened it up and asked it to download every piece of album art it could get its hands on.
I waited in anticipation, scrolling back and forth through the blank album covers. Finally, it finished. I happily scrolled back and forth a couple times, content with my new acquisition, and found an album to listen to as I went back to doing real work.
A while later I noticed my computer was a bit sluggish, so I glanced at my performance stats. Hmmm...thats odd, memory use is a bit high. Who's being greedy? Yup, iTunes was chewing up 200 megs of memory. "Ah!", I thought, "it must still have all those album covers in memory from downloading them, I'll just restart it." Exit, Restart iTunes. Ok, memory use back to normal.
I then decided to check out the scrolling again, 'cause, well, why not? I went to the beginning, and scrolled all the way to the end. Wheee! Hmm, memory use is going up again. Going way up. Let's see how much:
Yikes! 552 megabytes! And it wasn't even playing music. And it was minimized. To the system tray. And less than 200 of my albums actually have cover art.
Apparently, Apple is caching every single image in memory, just in case I decide to scroll all the way back to the other end, despite the fact that I can do the first scroll with no performance problems.
Ok, what if I switch out of CoverFlow mode? Down to 307 mb. Great. They're caching, and they're not freeing them, even when there is no possible way for me to view them. Even if I minimize it again, so that there is absolutely no possible way for me to directly access the cover art, the 300+ megs remain in memory. The only way to clear it out is to restart iTunes.
Now, on my machine here it's not a huge deal, I have 2 gigs of ram to play with, and while this takes up more than I'd like, I can live with it. But any lower, and iTunes would be crippling my machine, pushing everything, including itself, out into virtual memory.
The verdict: Hold off on using CoverFlow until they fix this in what I can only imagine is the soon-to-be-released version 7.01.
Update: In case it was not clear, this is running on Windows XP Pro SP2 with 2GB of RAM.
blog comments powered by Disqus