I’ve been using the Notes app to keep track of things including some notes with multiple pictures attached. This has made my Notes app challenge the memory on my devices when it is open, especially MacOS. Has anyone else run across this? Is my only option to archive some of the notes, which would make them less accessible.
The number of notes you have shouldn’t significantly affect the amount of memory that Notes (the app) uses on your device.
How much memory is Notes using and how much memory does your Mac have?
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I’m with @geoffaire the notes are stored in a Database on disk. Most of them are not in memory at any given moment. (With SSD’s there is almost no benefit to caching things that humans interact with. Caching is important in some applications but not notes apps.)
Can share a screenshot of your activity monitor on the memory tab? Including the memory pressure graph at the bottom would help.
Turned it (the whole laptop) off and back on again? That memory usage seems very unexpected
Wow. That is madness. Notes on my Mac is 200MB
Speculating now.
- As @Vincent_Ardern suggests reboot
- If the RAM usage remains high after reboot, is it possible that you have large files stored in notes and that has them open?
- Could your Notes database be corrupted?
FWIW I’m massively out of my league here. I only use Notes for a few things I share with my wife.
As a point of comparison, I have 361 notes (although I have culled once or twice so I’ve probably created 1,500 lifetime (only counting those that stuck around for more than 30 seconds).
32 GB RAM, notes is using 1.5 GB. Uptime of 14 hours at the moment.
I’ll acknowledge that Notes can use quite a bit of RAM but it’s usually somewhat proportional to how often I’m dipping into and out of it. I am curious whether or not I actually have more than 1.5 GB of content stored in it though…
Either way, I’d be concerned as soon as it’s e.g. using more than twice my web browser.
You’ve not accidentally dragged a video in have you?
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Yes, I probably have recorded a few short videos in Notes, along with pictures. Looking back I have notes from 2012!
I may need to consider a different method for taking notes on my phone etc.
I have re-booted my laptop and will take a look later. So far I haven’t received more memory warnings, but is using over 31 of the 36 GB’s. I may need to take a trip to the Genius Bar.
Really appreciate all your ideas! Thank you.
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The obvious test migrate the videos to some other place in your system and see over the course of the next few weeks what effect this has on memory usage.
Maybe my original hypothesis was wrong. Maybe Notes trains to maintain everything in memory. (As a recovering software developer this seems like utter madness.)
The fans have started on my MacBook Pro 16" M1 today. Not sure why, but it led me to Activity Monitor. After 5 days uptime, my Notes.app is using 1.8 GB RAM, from 32 GB.
Maybe the Notes app just needed some attention.
It overused memory as a means to get us to talk about it and now it feels seen, it can go back to normal levels.
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