The VideoLAN Forums

After I'm finished watching movie in VLC, usually an H.264 MKV, all of my memory is completely taken up by inactive memory. This is because VLC is causing the OS to catch all of the data that is read, something that isn't necessary.

This causes the OS to be fairly laggy, as writing to free memory is much faster than swapping out inactive memory. This can be solved with fcntl(F_NOCACHE)

I know of many other VLC users experiencing this same thing.

Yep. It is a great pain. The Mac gets very sluggish, close to useless for a long time also after having watched a DVD-movie. If I need to work on my mac after having watched a movie and is in a hurry I have to restart it, it is faster than the total waiting time for att the apps to take back the memory stolen.

Pausing a movie and trying to open another program or just looking around the files is not fun either and sometimes takes forever.

-I really hope that fcntl(F_NOCACHE) turns out useful to the programmers.