Why is iTunes using so much Memory?

[agentphish]

I LOVE iTunes to death... but It uses SO much more ram than say winamp 5...
I don't know about you guys, but on average it is using 28 mb of ram, and sometimes i see it using up to 43mb of ram at any given moment. Its kinda crazy because its really not doing much else other than playing my music, whereas my buddy can run winamp5 and it uses less than 10mb of ram at any given time,

Is there a solution to this or is iTunes really that bulky on system resources?

[EvilDude]

you're lucky, mine uses upto 70mb.... pretty things come at a price i suppose.

[Teqnilogik]

Yep iTunes is bulky. It's an excellent application but yes it does hog more resources than most audio playing apps. Apple recommends you that have a minimum of 128MB of RAM (256MB is recommended) to use iTunes.

Because I have no life, I setup iTunes on a 233MHz Pentium II computer with 160MB RAM and it runs a tad on the slow side but it still works and I am able to do other stuff in the background as well. So although its RAM usage may be a tad high, it does work even on a lower end system such as that.

[Prudence]

Mine used up to 70MB of memory when I wasn't even playing music or ripping CDs. It's incredibly annoying.

[liat]

Originally posted by Teqnilogik
Yep iTunes is bulky. It's an excellent application but yes it does hog more resources than most audio playing apps. Apple recommends you that have a minimum of 128MB of RAM (256MB is recommended) to use iTunes.

Because I have no life, I setup iTunes on a 233MHz Pentium II computer with 160MB RAM and it runs a tad on the slow side but it still works and I am able to do other stuff in the background as well. So although its RAM usage may be a tad high, it does work even on a lower end system such as that.

heh....the same is here, but note, my PC is P4 2.4ghz / 1gb ram .... I wait about a minut the program to show up after clicking iTunes icon, my 3DSmax 6 opens faster ....

[agentphish]

damn man 1 minute? thats a long time.

I guess they dont know how to develop stuff for windows over at apple. Guess theres nothing that can be done for now.

Peace

[Teqnilogik]

1 minute seems a bit long. On my 2.8GHz with 512MB of RAM iTunes loads in 6 seconds. Since iTunes was just introduced for Windows in October of last year I think Apple is doing very well with iTunes. It doesn't crash for me, it performs relatively well minus the memory issue but it doesn't lag my system. Hell, I have it running decently on a 233MHz Pentium II with 160MB of RAM. Apple is targeting people with half-decent PCs with 128MB+ memory. 128MB of RAM is like the minimum these days because of operating system like Windows XP that recommends that much to run well. I think XP can get by on 64MB but I'm assuming it would run like crap. So for me, the memory issue isn't a concern. Though in the future I would like to see Apple try to improve on the memory usage as much as possible.

[EvilDude]

You guys have decent machines and it takes that long? Mine loads within 2 seconds and I'm only on 1.8 ghz... I only have 256mb DDR ram too, and 70mb of that eaten by iTunes makes computer a bit sluggish.

[agentphish]

mine is 2ghz AMD (oc'd) with 1 gb pc3200 ddr, it onyl takes about 6 seconds to load.

and as I said before uses up to 40 mb ram.
usually around 28-35 steadily

[toozinger]

Originally Posted by EvilDude

you're lucky, mine uses upto 70mb.... pretty things come at a price i suppose.

I'm on a macbook pro 2010, and itunes uses about 244mb idling... and about the same playing music.

Why is it so high???

I can still function fine, because I have 4gb ram, but why does it use ~1/16 of my ram?

[oobujoobu]

Mine is currently using 258MB and its been on pause for over an hour now!

I've found that smart playlists make quite a difference to the RAM and CPU useage, as it's presumably trying to update various playlists each time a song has finished playing.