Hey dudes.. Using REAPER 3.0 on a macbook w/ 4gb RAM under OSX 10.5.6, sometimes memory usage quickly shoots up until there's only a tiny bit left, things start paging out and everything crawls to a halt... It can go from ~3gb free down to 100mb or less within 3 or 4 minutes. Seems to do it quicker when there are more tracks and plugins. Biggest sessions I've tried were only 6 tracks with 11 plugins or so (mix of JS, VST and AU). I can't seem to narrow it down to any specific session or plugins or anything.. tried taking off everything but JS plugs and it still happened. Sometimes happens even when I load a session and leave it sitting there without playing/recording. OSX's Activity Monitor only shows REAPER itself as using a small amount, e.g. 50mb.. The rest of the memory which is being used is reported under "active memory", but I can't see any actual processes using that amount of memory... (edit: I'm sure it's REAPER though, nothing like this ever happens except when REAPing) Upon quitting REAPER, memory usage stops going up, but active memory only goes back down very slowly, if at all.. (edit: seems like it doesn't go back down at all..just left it for ages and all that memory is still "active") For some reason this only sometimes happens. Right now I have a session going which, half an hour ago, was making memory use shoot up at about 15mb every couple seconds! This time it's not going up. (and now I've just quit and reloaded the session and it's doing it again...) :D Sometimes it does it right after a reboot, sometimes it will work normally for a few hours and then suddenly start doing it.... Sorry I can't narrow it down any more! Only thing I can think of is, I don't think it's happened when I created a new session and did some recording/mixing.. Only when loading an existing session. I'm not 100% sure of that yet though. Same thing happens with both my firewire audio interface (m-audio fw410) and the macbook's onboard soundcard (with m-audio unplugged) btw.. Anyone else experience this? Any ideas? :)

using many instances of Kontakt or other streaming sample player by any chance? KP2 will allocate vast amounts of RAM for streaming playback for each instance of the plug...

Nope.. just plain REAPER sessions. I realised that every time it's worked for hours and then started doing this was after I had quit and reloaded.. It seems that if it's going to use up all free memory it will start doing it immediately after loading a session. If I load one and the problem doesn't happen, it seems to then remain stable for the whole time, until some other time I load REAPER. So I've started just repeatedly quitting and reloading sessions and watching the memory usage until I get lucky and it's stable.. :) Seems like it must be something serious though!

Still the same in 3.01 :) I noticed today that this runaway memory use halts during rendering, and then proceeds again when rendering is over, if that means anything... [edit] - it also halts while REAPER is minimised/hidden

Ok, weird.. since i hadn't seen any other reports of similar problems I figured it must be caused by something in my setup.. tonight I tried removing all VST and AU plugins from the OSX audio plugins folder (just in case, even though the leak(?) happened on sessions with no plugins).. loaded up REAPER, the memory leak thing still happened... oh well. so i put all the plugins back and the leak hasn't come back since. I've quit and reloaded various sessions many many times and it hasn't happened once, where before it was happening like 9 times out of 10. No idea why this might be. Maybe some kind of weirdness in a cache somewhere or something? Anyway yay!