Every couple of years, I seem to switch launchers. I’ve just gone back to Launchbar, and now remembered why I switched away from it in the first place - the insane memory usage. On both my Macs, I’m using in the range of 400-500 MB, with the occasional beachball. I checked the indexing progress, and indexing is complete. I’ve gone into the indexing rules, and really trimmed down the folders and other items being indexed, but it hasn’t made much of a dent.
Any suggestions for how to get LaunchBar to be more usable, from a memory-usage perspective?
I’ve also noticed that Launchbar’s resource usage can be a bit on the high side at times. For me the CPU usage is more of an issue.
It might be worth reaching out to the support (if you haven’t already) to see if they have any suggestions to offer…and so they’re aware of the issue.
You might also want to check out App Tamer. I sometimes use it to put a ceiling on an app’s CPU usage (e.g. if I’m doing an export from ScreenFlow and want to free up some system resources temporarily). I’m not sure if it provides a way for limiting memory usage.
Thanks, Tim. I rebooted my MacBook Pro, and watched in Activity Monitor as LaunchBar, over the course of a few minutes, gradually climbed in memory usage. It now seems to be sitting at around 310 MB. I’ll let things run their course for a few days, and if it doesn’t improve, I’ll reach out to Support and try App Tamer.
I have a resource usage of 145 mb with an uptime of 13 days. Have you maybe made your entire home folder searchable? Since LB runs own indexing engine it can make a huge difference.
I have the default setup since I just installed it a couple of hours ago, which does have the home folder indexed, but only at the folder level. Subfolders aren’t indexed.
Just an update that I’m also seeing regular spikes of the CPU, on both my devices, to close to 100%. This causes delays with LaunchBar even responding. I’d say it was how I set the app up, but I just installed it and only unchecked several boxes in the indexing options. I love the app otherwise, so I hope I can figure this out.
Perhaps I’m just used to Alfred, which had a very low overhead, and was fast and responsive. LaunchBar version 6 was released in 2014, I believe, so maybe a new version is on the way.
I think you need to play with the indexing settings. My LaunchBar instance goes between 50-75MB and I have everything I need. For me, the key was realizing which folders needed to be indexed and which needed only to have the “Browse subfolders” functionality at most.
I believe I may have identified the culprit. My Contacts has contacts going back 25 years, with many duplicates. I just merged all my duplicates, and I still have about 3500 contacts. Time to start pruning. In the meantime, I turned off indexing for Contacts, and it got my memory usage down to 72 MB for the last 10 minutes, with no CPU spikes, which is a first for the day.