a process has begun, and its eating my RAM!

E

Elliotjnewman

Registered
Ok, did quite a large scan tonight (350 mb) with all my scan settings turned to the max. It took a good 30 mins to complete, but after which everything was running slow (including my cursor which wasnt even visible - but I could still click - never seen that one before!) I restarted which seemed like the logical thing to do, but I noticed my machine was still running slow. I decided to have a look at activity monitor and I have noticed that I only have 7 mb RAM left as a process called qtimageserver was taking up 250 mb of my RAM and 75% cpu and over 1gig vm.

I forced quit the app and it just started up again - I had a look at it and it is listing the scan I made earlier as one of its open files:

/Users/elliotnewman/Documents/PHOTOGRAPHY/GLASS_HOLDER/nick/nick_01_ICEON_othersOFF.tif

even though I had saved and closed down the scan software and the scanner.

Now I am left with a computer that runs like a commador 64, typing this message is even difficult and painfully slow.

Anyone know what this process is? and how to kill it? is there a shell command that will kill it?
 
Oh, well I seemed to have fixed the problem. I went into the info about that scan image and told it to open in photoshop instead of nikon scan, and then quit the qtimageserver app from AM, and it didnt restart...

Very strange... though it is the first time I have used nikon scan ver4, so maybe the folkes over at the scanning forum mhave the same problem...

in the future, is there a way to kill an app from terminal?
 
Use "ps" to get the process id (PID).

Then use "sudo kill -9 <process id>" or just plain "kill -9 <process id>" if the process is owned by you.

You can also use "killall <process name>" and that will shut down all processes matching that name.
 
And 'top' will give you a automatically updating, paged list of processes. The default is by PID, so on a recently rebooted machine the more recently started processes will be at the top. More useful, though, is 'top -o cpu', which will order the list according to cpu usage or 'top -o vsize', which will order the list according to memory usage. Type 'man top' to see what other options are available.

Spot the trouble maker there and kill the process as per ElDiabloConCaca's instructions.

Opening a terminal window and running 'top' also burn CPU cycles and time if your CPU is already pinned, so you may be better off doing a 'Force Quit' and using an educated guess which program is the offender.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top