Apple Photos processing, memory, CPU problems

[tgodfrey99]

When I first converted my iPhoto library to Photos, Photos launched fine for the next 2-3 times. My library is approximately 25GB. When I next opened Photos, the CPU started maxing out between kernel task and a process called com.apple.photomodel (in fact Activity Monitor showed above 100% CPU usage which didn't make sense). That same process left running would take more and more RAM. After 3 hours it was up over 40GB of RAM. This happens every time now when I open Photos (I tried leaving it running longer and eventually computer would become usable - wheel spinning but never stopping. I have found very little info on com.apple.photomodel about what this process is doing. The things I have tried based on what I could find from web searches:

- Restarting
- Resetting PRAM
- Rebuilding the Photos library
- Quitting Photos normally (stuck on "Closing Library" for more than an hour)
- Allowing the Photos and that photo model process to run. Left it for more than 16 hours on two different occasions. I've read posts to let Photos process faces and it can take many hours. I don't have a huge library (25GB). At this point I cannot leave it to process even longer as I use this computer for my work and it is usable when in this state. Also this last time it eventually came to halt (wheel just spinning) but didn't totally freeze.

I have a 2010 Macbook Pro, with 4GB of RAM and running Yosemite 10.10.3. I realize this isn't really enough RAM but my understanding is that while it will be slow it should still be usable.

I did consider going back to iPhoto, but as Photos is usable at this point I cannot get my most recent Photos out of there and my old iPhotos library is missing many recent photos.

Any help or additional suggestions you have are much appreciated.

Tim

 

[MacInWin]

25GB is a large library of pictures. And it can take quite a while for the initial indexing to occur. Combine that factor with having only 4GB of RAM and you are undoubtedly having HUGE swapping (you can check that by looking at the memory tab in Activity Monitor. At the bottom is your Memory status, including Swap Used. If you are using swap, you are writing memory to the HD when memory gets full, then reading it in when it's needed again. That is SLOOOOOOOW). So, when the application pulls in another picture, it has to write out some of what's in memory to get space to put that image, process the image, maybe swap something else out to make room for the part of the program to process that image, then repeat that process for the next, etc, etc, etc (yes, that's simplistic because a lot more is going on, but you get the idea). Eventually you got to 40GB of RAM, which means every time it has to swap something out it has to write out almost 40GB to the HD! Then if it finds it needs something in that 40GB, it's got to go find it and read it back in, probably writing something else out to make room. So, get more memory for your machine, at least 8GB, but with that kind of photo production going on and using it for work, you probably ought to get the MAX you can jam in that machine. The goal is to have zero Swap Used.

As for the CPU utilization, greater than 100% is logical in that 100% is one core and you have a multi-core CPU. So you can see greater than 100% if more than one core is in use.