WeatherCat slows down my iMac

[hokiedoug]

I have a late 2019 iMac that WeatherCat slows down significantly.  The machine has a 3.7Ghz i5 processor and it is running MacOS 14.1.2.  Activity monitor shows it is using significant CPU time when the machine is otherwise idle.  Staring any other process takes CPU utilization to 90% to 100%.  kernal_task shows high utilization as it begins to throttle processes.  Is this normal or am I missing some setting?  Help!

[Blicj11]

Welcome to the WC Forum and thanks for your first post. Please tell us what version of WeatherCat you are running and how much RAM is on your iMac.

[elagache]

Dear hokiedoug, Blick, and WeatherCat troubleshooters,

Since it is your first posting, indeed welcome to the WeatherCat forum! 

As Blick requests, please provide us with more details so that we can help you solve your problem.

One possibility is that you are allowing either WeatherCat or your Mac (or both) to run too long without restarting.  WeatherCat users system resources that cause it to increase in its memory use.  It needs to be restarted periodically depending on the graphs, gauges, and other services you use.  Also, MacOS isn't as efficient as it once was in reclaiming memory.  Eventually you must reboot get back all your free memory.  Because I use my Mac extensively, I need to reboot at least once a week, sometimes twice a week.

Please do let us know how we can help otherwise.

Edouard

[hokiedoug]

My version of WeatherCat is 3.20.  My memory is 32MB.  I think my problem does not appear to be memory use, it is CPU use.  My memory use on WeatherCat was about 600GB before I just rebooted it.   Its been about 10 min since restart and its now at 200MB memory use.

[elagache]

Dear hokiedoug and WeatherCat power users,

My version of WeatherCat is 3.20.  My memory is 32MB.  I think my problem does not appear to be memory use, it is CPU use.  My memory use on WeatherCat was about 600GB before I just rebooted it.   Its been about 10 min since restart and its now at 200MB memory use.

What features of WeatherCat are you using?  For example I decided to give up on the Custom Gauges because they were consuming a lot of memory and CPU.  It is true that WeatherCat is the one user application that typically is using the most CPU.  My installation of WeatherCat is typically using about 50-75% of one core of my 2018 Mac MIni.  At least my machine doesn't even blink an eye that such a load. However, I do have twice as much RAM as you do.

Edouard

[Blicj11]

I agree with Edouard. WC is a major CPU user. I do have 40 GBs of RAM. I use two custom gauges on my desktop but use SteelSeries gauges on my website. Like Edouard, I just reboot the Mac once in a while. For me, about every 3-4 weeks does the trick.

[hokiedoug]

Thanks for the info.  I am using no custom gauges and I am not feeding my own website.  I do upload to Wonderground and CWOP.   In about 24 hrs I got to 1.2GB of memory usage.  How much memory usage do you get to before you reboot?

[The Grand Poohbah]

Thanks for the info.  I am using no custom gauges and I am not feeding my own website.  I do upload to Wonderground and CWOP.   In about 24 hrs I got to 1.2GB of memory usage.  How much memory usage do you get to before you reboot?

My last reboot was 10 days ago for a system update (14.1.2). WeatherCat is currently using 1.03 GB of memory.

[JosBaz]

This is also my experience; when WC starts it seems heappy with 450MB or so, but over time this increases to well above 1GB.

I am running WC on a 'Late 2011' Mac Mini with 16GB or RAM. It works... but I am asking Santa for a newer model with more horsepower.

Jos

[elagache]

Dear hokiedoug, Grand, Jos, and WeatherCat faithful,

After 1 day and 18 hours my present WeatherCat installation is only at 719 MB of RAM.  After restarting, WeatherCat uses only slightly less: 716 MB.

Can you tell us more about how you use WeatherCat?   I see that you are running the latest version of MacOS.  That could have something to do with it.  I have noticed that Apple has been less and less careful about making sure that system resources are miserly with their memory use.  I am still back at MacOS 10.14 Mojave.

Edouard

[coveredinoil]

I'm running WC on a late 2013 27" iMac, intel i5, Catalina, 16GB of memory. WC has been up for about a week and using 10% CPU and 409MB of memory. No custom gauges, but do display WC controller, 1hr rain graph, daily rain graph, WC statistics and the standard station gauges all at the same time. Hope this is of some help.

[Blicj11]

My iMac has been up for 10 days, is using 9% of the CPU, and 1.5 GB of memory.

[wurzelmac]

I'm eagerly awaiting a native Apple M version of WeatherCat, although the current one is doing fine so far on my Mac mini M2. But when I am going through the menues of WeatherCat I can see the beachball for much too often... It seems that WC is very busy doing its job.

[hokiedoug]

Wow.  I just restarted WeatherCat about 30min ago.  It is using between 50% & 80% CPU and is up to 226 MB of memory.

[elagache]

Dear hokiedoug and WeatherCat nerdy users,

Wow.  I just restarted WeatherCat about 30min ago.  It is using between 50% & 80% CPU and is up to 226 MB of memory.

Are you getting those numbers from Activity Monitor?  The CPU usage in Activity Monitor is for 1 core only of your i5 processor.  It has 6 cores, so keeping 1 core at that load shouldn't effect your iMac at all.  WeatherCat has a comparable effect on my Mac Mini, but I experience no slowdown at all.  If WeatherCat is slowing down your iMac it has to be some sort of special process that is causing the problem.  I can't think of anything that could be doing that at the moment.

Edouard