VLC slows down my Mac Mini

[booster69]

Hi guys,

I've been an extremely content VLC user for some years now.
I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my projector and have always used VLC for watching all my video files.
My Mac is getting on a bit now - it's a 2Ghz with 1GB RAM. It had always run perfectly, even with many applications open simultaneously, something that used to amaze me, it seemed so much more efficient than any PC I had owned!

I only started to get problems when I upgraded to a newer version of VLC. I had been running the same version for many years - ver 0.8 or 0.9 I think. I am now on ver 1.1.3.
Basically, now when I open VLC the system initially is fine. Video playback is perfect, even 720p mkv files run without glitching, the problems occur when I try to exit to finder or switch applications. The system takes an age to respond and I usually end up with the rainbow wheel. This behavior continues until I manage to quit VLC, which in itself proves difficult because the system is running so slow, then everything is fine again.

I thought initially that I might need to upgrade my RAM to take the newer version. Maybe that is the case, but if so it is a little frustrating, because I can run an xvid film through Quicktime and be able to run many other apps simultaneously, but cannot with VLC.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

[kdean]

Definitely sounds like RAM is being paged to disk and the slowness in switching to other apps is the memory being retrieved back from the hard drive. If possible a RAM upgrade would be advised. Someone else more familiar with VLC's memory related settings (if any) may be able to suggest some internal adjustments.

[ajmas]

Have you compared the RAM usage of 0.9 and 1.1.3 o your Mac mini? Also see what the RAM usage is in general.

BTW If you are a position to be able to, I would recommend getting the 4GB of memory, either way. As kdean suggested this sounds like a paging issue.

[Entropy]

This is because of an issue with newer versions of VLC. It is causing the OS to catch all of the data that it reads, filling up your memory with inactive memory. This drastically slows the system down. I experience the same issues on my 2.4GHz 4GB MacBook.

[roger jonsson]

4 GB of ram doesn't cure the problem completely either. Often after having watched a DVD (the movie is more than 4 GB) makes the Mac is very slow and only a few MB of memory left. Starting a new program, doing what ever that needs new memory takes forever. Even some drop down menues refuse for several seconds. Probably because it takes time for OSX to release the memory cached. I really hate that part of OS X. Caching is great for small files, but for large ones it most often is a great pain and pointless, -since it is nearly always read only once...
Just copy a videofile larger than RAM and you are there. Everything else new takes forever afterwards, sometimes for a long while.

But since all software doesn't seem to steal all the memory, I guess there is a way around. Maybe it is about reading/releasing the files in smaller chunks (fooling OSX into releasing cashed memory as it goes)?

[roger jonsson]

fcntl(F_NOCACHE)
-Reading without caching was suggested in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=83960

[roger jonsson]

I Just tested a mpeg2 movie from the hard drive and yes VLC chews up the free memory constantly.

Edit:
NOT TRUE: "Mplayer Extended doesn't seem to do this."
Sorry. I was fooled by the caching. As soon as Mplayer Extended passed the parts read by VLC, it started chewing free memory as well.