I too have this problem of a huge "Inactive"
memory leak not being released during playback nor upon quitting VLC.
I am running 1.1.3 on Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on a mostly stock core i5 iMac from 2010 (has Xcode + macports ghostscript + avidemux + handbrake).
I tried the dev suggestion of deleting VLC preferences. This had no effect.
To be clear, whenever I play (not pause) an x264 video inside an mkv container or an XviD inside an avi, my Inactive and Used
Memory
as displayed in Activity Monitor slowly increase until my system runs completely out of Free
Memory, and I end up swapping after watching
a film or two. Active
Memory remains constant, and so does Wired. When I pause or stop the video, the
memory stops being used up.
Any ideas? I really appreciate all your work on this software. It's really awesome.
EDIT: After reading thru some apple docs on
memory, like this one:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ ... emory.html
I found that
memory mapping will eat up inactive
memory, and that the system should use the inactive
memory when it needs it
rather than swapping. Well mine just uses all 8 GB of ram. This seemed like an Apple problem the more I read.
But this made me think about VLC's
memory map option. What if I disabled the express usage of
memory mapping?
So I turned off my Input Codecs -> Access Modules -> MMap -> Use file
memory mapping, and now my system uses
Active
memory during playback not Inactive
memory. The Active
memory gets released upon quitting VLC as I figured
it should.
So I guess I don't have a problem per se. It might even be normal behavior.