Steam causing memory leak on OS X Mavericks

[aureus]

I've been noticing over the last few weeks that something keeps consuming my hard disk space and after a bit of digging it appears I have come across the (or at least a) culprit: Steam.

In particular, as long as Steam is running on my computer, the distnoted process (the distributed notification daemon) leaks a few kilobytes of memory per second. Since I've been leaving Steam running in the background, this adds up over a few days to gigabytes of memory, eating up both physical memory and eventually swap space.

Running the terminal command sudo dtruss -p <pid of distnoted> while Steam is running displays about a dozen lines per second which mostly look like:

kevent64(0x3, 0x7FFF7C9B3130, 0x1) = 1 0
workq_kernreturn(0x20, 0x0, 0x1) = 0 0
workq_kernreturn(0x20, 0x0, 0x1) = 0 0
kevent64(0x3, 0x7FFF7C9B3130, 0x1) = 1 0
workq_kernreturn(0x20, 0x0, 0x1) = 0 0
workq_kernreturn(0x20, 0x0, 0x1) = 0 0

These lines do not appear nearly as frequently if I quit Steam.

I'm not familiar with the internal workings of Steam, but looking over the NSDistributedNotificationCenter reference (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/cocoa/reference/foundation/classes/NSDistributedNotificationCenter_Class/Reference/Reference.html), my guess is that steam is either repeatedly calling - addObserver: or is posting notifications faster than the observers are consuming them.

[ChaosContrl]

So it confirms my own opinion on why my hard disk storage was decreasing in availability...

[Winter]

So what would be a good solution for this until they fix this (it doesn't seem like they fix things on mac that well on Steam so I don't have high hopes. I have issues with Steam overlay crashing my mac and its been this way for months).

Would making sure to restart it every few hours help? Or do i have to restart the mac entirely? I have tended to keep Steam running 24/7 for days lately.

BTW I am using the beta version, don't see any difference except a much better looking dock icon.

[.Bhaze]

Same here. With Steam running for a while, distnoted process runs at >100% regular CPU capacity (MBAir CPU is under clocked by default.)

• MacBook Air 13-inch, Mid 2013
  
• OS X 10.9.2 (13C1021)
  
• Running latest stable Steam build. (Steam package versions: 1407966480)

[Angry Over Videogames]

I've also observed the behavior of distnoted growing in memory usage, only while steam is running.

• On a 15" Early 2011 Macbook Pro
  
• OS X 10.9.4
  
• Steam package versions: 1409240101

Disnoted grows from using about 3 megs of RAM when steam isn't running to a hundred something in an hourish and this weekend grew to over 4gb which is what alerted me to the problem in the first place.

Has anyone found a workaround for this or had the problem go away with an update?

[Dazey]

I'm seeing this happen as well, only noticed it in the last 2 weeks so I believe it's from a recent update.

• 27-inch Mid 2010 iMac
  
• OSX 10.9.4
  
• Steam package version: 1409240101
  

[ehyder]

I have been having even more problems with Steam after the last round of updates. Games are crashing, especially when Steam is sending me sales messages, and harder to tell, syncing files. I am also getting a message asking me to allow Steam to use the accessiblity settings every single time I open a game. I get this message despite the fact that Steam is already enabled in the settings.

Anyone else experiencing these Mac issues and figure out any settings that keep the crashing to a minimum?

[Dazey]

I had to re-enable steam in the accessibility settings after the update, but only once. Haven't noticed any of the other things you mentioned though.

[ehyder]

Tnank you, I will try that then. Maybe I will be lucky and there is just something wacky going on because I have not re-enabled the setting.

[Robot Monster]

I've been noticing distnoted gradually gobbling all my RAM, too. To get it back without having to reboot, issue the following from the command line to restart distnoted:

launchctl stop com.apple.distnoted.xpc.agent
launchctl start com.apple.distnoted.xpc.agent

[Dazey]

I just stop the process in Activity Monitor. Do you commands do anything different?

[buddhapest]

if you stop steam distnoted relinquishes the massive memory its been using. no need to kill it.

[Dazey]

In my experience it's a lot faster to kill the process than to restart steam. Do you think quitting Distnoted is harmful?

[buddhapest]

it's a notification system used for a lot more than steam so killing it may have undesirable side effects

[Dazey]

Every time I quit the process it restarts immediately with a reasonable amount of memory allocated, so I'm not to concerned in that case.

[buddhapest]

whatever works for you man . i tend to avoid killing OS specific processes ;)