f.lux causing memory leaks in other running applications?

hordur

I have a late 2013 model 21.5" iMac with 16GB ram running OS X 10.11.4. I was having this problem where most applications were allocating memory out of control and the OS would have allocated tens of GB in swap, highest I saw was 56GB (more info on Macrumors forum).

After reinstalling OSX and trying to figure out what the issue was I have now pinpointed f.lux (I was using the latest version installed through brew cask) to be the cause of the problem:
I disabled f.lux and rebooted, ran the computer for a few days without any memory problems. Then, yesterday morning, I ran f.lux again and left the computer alone. 9 hours later it had allocated 13GB in swap with various applications allocating the memory.

These are screenshots of Activity Monitor just after I started f.lux and then 9 hours later:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/00w547x5c28tg55/Screenshot 2016-04-20 08.47.31.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j04jlxppzklwz41/Screenshot 2016-04-20 17.53.41.png?dl=0

So, for now I have disabled f.lux. If there's some interest in figuring out why this happens I can provide additional system info or run other versions of f.lux.

herf

f.lux updates the system profile many times per day on dual-GPU macs, and it's possible that Photoshop doesn't expect this to happen and leaks memory. Sounds like quite a bit.

You can turn our profile writer off using the instructions here:

https://justgetflux.com/news/2014/10/28/profile.html

(If anyone has a way to report this to Adobe, please do.)