I have an old MAC (2010 model) and i am sure a lot of people do. My MAC has 4 GB RAM and i recently upgraded to the latest El Captain release. I work on Eclipse IDE and also use OEPE (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse). Now all of us know that IDE based development with a lot of plugins and integrated application server requires a good amount of RAM for a smooth experience.
One of the things i was running into was that, simple actions on the IDE such as ⌘c to copy text would lead to a spinning wheel for several minutes. Looking for answers, i first looked at the Activity Monitor and found an unsuspecting culprit among a few others.
Chrome Extensions
I figured out that i had about 10 chrome extensions and they were consuming a good part my heap. I was using extensions such as Live Http Headers, Cookie Inspector, PostMan and ChromeCast etc. Extensions show up as "Google Chrome Helper" process in activity monitor.
Also as the number of tabs in your browser increases the amount of RAM consumed increases. Specifically if you have pages with dynamic content such as gmail-inbox open in one of the tabs then the RAM consumed by chrome shoots up a bit. When i googled later about chrome RAM consumption i found this technical post on chrome RAM consumption here. The post also talks about memory freeing extensions :-). So while one can explore such extensions, the simplest thing that let me continue with my IDE work was to unload the extensions and reduce the number of tabs and open sites.
Hope this simple post helps someone living with limited RAM and an old MAC like mine. There were other things which i had to do to get rid of slowness of my MAC post upgrade to El Captain.
- Deleting the controversial MacKeeper App on my machine.
- ReIndex Spotlight : complete reindexing of the mac's main search engine.
