Drive for Desktop RAM Consumption (and other issues) (Mac)

[DriveAppSucks]

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this, but I'm at my wit's end with the Drive for Desktop app and am likely going to switch cloud services soon.

Has anyone been able to get to the bottom of, or better yet—remedy, Drive's tendency to consume vast amounts of RAM?

Also, I'm seeing recent reports that users are somehow all of a sudden able to search Drive contents on their desktop with Spotlight? Does anyone know why this is occurring with what seems a tiny minority of users? And how I might be able to get the same functionality for myself?

[Tom_Sch]

Hey @DriveAppSucks 

I wouldn't say that the Drive app sucks. It might not be perfect, but it is working. Which Mac and which version are you using? I just checked the memory allocation on my M1 and it is okay. Chrome is taking up way more memory even though it shouldn't, but that is a known issue. 

How much memory does Drive consume on your Mac?

Regarding the spotlight search there is a longer thread about it, but if I remember correctly no one knows why some users are able to use Spotlight for Drive and some not. 

[DriveAppSucks]

Hey Tom, appreciate the quick and thoughtful reply.

If there were enough room, I would have chose the name "DriveAppSucksForMyPurposesAndComputer". Those purposes being frequent backup, storage, and cloud access of graphic design project files. 

A Drive Community thread I find extremely relatable here.

Some quick context on how I use the Drive for Desktop app:

• I use it in streaming mode (I have 1.5TB of data in my Drive, comprised of mostly older client project files and various design assets). But I usually have ~5 current project and/or client folders that I've "made available offline" via the Drive desktop app.
• I only work within those current project folders that I've made available offline.
• I usually "pause" syncing during the bulk of the work day in the hopes that this mitigate any resource hogging on the part of Drive. (Scare quotes because I'm not sure what "pausing" actually does, as I've tested it and I'm still able to access streamed folders which I haven't made available offline.)

I would have though that by keeping my ongoing editing and saving only to those offline folders, I would mitigate any loading and resource-hogging that would normally occur from Drive's need to access/download/cache streamed files.

Frequently, simply browsing through offline Drive folders and clicking on various files will have Drive at at least 30% CPU. The simple act of browsing files within Finder has become a fairly tedious and time-consuming process. Somewhat less regularly, Drive will get up to 80%+ CPU and pretty much stall every other process on my computer. One thing that did help was making sure none of my fonts were stored within a streamed folder. But these memory issues are still frequent and significant.

Now, my Macbook is fairly old at this point (new M1 is on the way), but I can directly attribute a general lagginess and slowness to the Drive desktop app. Before the forced transition from Backup & Sync, I had 0 issues with my trusted Macbook and workflow. Now it seems my system and/or workflow is just incompatible with the Drive desktop app, or at least to the extent that it doesn't slow down my whole work day.

FWIW:
2015 Macbook Pro
16GB RAM
600+ GB free on hard drive

[Tom_Sch]

Hmmm we are using Drive for Desktop on old MacBooks from 2015 and newer ones from 2017 and a few M1. We are not pausing sync and working online with most of our files. We have about 30TB of data. Everything is stored in Drive from old archived projects up to new ones. Everything is working in streaming mode. There are some known issues, but they are not tied to Drive. They are more cloud work related. For example if you want to work on a large Keynote file you should copy that to your desktop and not make is offline in Drive. This will block your machine if you change one little thing. But I have to say that our keynote files are huge!

If you pause Drive and work on your files and start syncing when done this shouldn't block your Mac. It might consume some bandwidth and CPU when uploading all your changes. Have you tried to work online all the time? 

I know that browsing your files in the Finder can be slow sometimes, but it shouldn't. I assume you are using the latest version of Drive?

[DriveAppSucks]

Interesting, that at least does give me hope that there's some way to configure this to a point where my whole system isn't being lagged up.

Generally I am working on relatively large files. Sometimes I'll be working on .PSDs that are 100mb+, potentially up to 750mb.

I have not tried working online all the time as I imagine that would only make these issues worse.

I'm on Version: 57.0.5.0 (Intel)

Maybe just due to the nature of the Drive app and how it works VS the old Backup and Sync, the only solution for my workflow is storing all current projects in local folders and moving to Drive when complete/ready for backup. Tho that is far from ideal.

Tangentially, another frequent issue is Drive's tendency to randomly disconnect. I have a steady fiber internet connection and have eliminated my network/wifi as the cause. Maybe once a week or so, Drive will momentarily disconnect, causing the following issues:

• If I have a Drive file open, regardless of whether it's been made available offline, I will be unable to save the file after the disconnect. I've found a workaround by saving these files to my desktop and moving back to their Drive location.
• My saved Finder favorites (in sidebar) will be wiped out. This may seem minor but it's actually a crucial part of my workflow. I tend to have ~10 saved Finder favorites at any given time, giving me quick access to folders & files which I would otherwise have to access by sifting through a fairly complex folder structure.

[Tom_Sch]

So if you have a fibre connection upload and download should be pretty fast and working with large files shouldn't be a problem. Well I assume we are talking about something like 300Mbit down / 100 or better up.

Maybe you can check in your settings how often you have to log in to your Google services. I know I can change that in the admin console for our employees. 

Regarding the saved favorites. That is a bummer. I am sitting in front of an iMac 27" running macOS Monterey and I added a shared drive to my Finders sidebar, quit Drive, clicked on the link in the sidebar, saw a lot of messages that it is not available, relaunched Drive and it was working again and it never disappeared. 

I would give streaming another go and see if it is better.

I played with settings, larger files etc and it works and I have no complains for our employees. Or they don't say anything 😉 

But overall this should just work no matter how old your Mac is or whatever files you stored. Yeah I know there are some exceptions. I wouldn't store Keynote files or even my Photo library on any cloud storage and work with it 😉 

[MariaLaFumada]

For me the drive app is using 69GB of ram i mean google why 

[Nickfromsneaks]

I'm having very similar issues, on my Intel macbook Pro and my M1 Mac mini. 

Tonight my activity monitor told be drive was using 40gb+ of memory. The macbook fan was whizzing like it was gonna take off. 

Backup and sync was never like this. 

[coblejesse]

I am also having the same issue with my m1 macbook pro 32 gb ram.  It's literally at 11 gb's right now using 117 threads.

Is there some configuration that I have done wrong?  I mean I am a programmer for a living so I don't think I would have done something terribly wrong that I shouldn't have.

[coblejesse]

Now my google drive is using up literally 61 GB's! of ram and swap.  I only have 32 Gbs.  This is insane.  You can't tell me there's nothing wrong with this app.

[christiannewman]

77MB here

[k11111]

What version of Macbook?

[Tom_Sch]

There isn't much you can do wrong 😉 I am using a MacBook Air M2 for about 2 weeks and Drive is about 65MB so far and I hope that it will stay that way.

@coblejesse Did you uninstall it and reinstalled it? Which version are you using? I am running Version: 65.0.4.0 (Apple Silicon)

[coblejesse]

So what do I do about this?  If I kept it going, who knows how much ram it would use, and is pushing my swap extremely hard.  Is this the place to ask this question or should I start a new thread somewhere else?

[verbalgsx]

Google drive was at 5GB today, rebooted and it back to 270mb. but was back to 1GB within a few minutes.  I do notice my machine with start dragging after a day or two, if I close google drive it comes back to normal.  I have version 68 and you'd think they'd have fixed this memory issue by now.

[k11111]

This is also happening to me right now. Google drive will balloon to 25GB+ the longer I let it running, then it starts to take over all the processing power of the PC (its running 100+ threads). It also seems to be leaking onto my SSD (on disk my ssd shows it has 1TB consumed, but disk utility shows 1.5TB is used). I'm syncing direct from my SSD.

[echopraxia]

Google Drive is crashing my computer. I'm seeing 50GB+ of virtual memory usage, and consuming all resources. There does not appear to be a way to tell the system to make this a low priority resource request so that it doesn't consume all resources until the system crashes. This has been a known issue with Google Drive for about a year or two, will it ever be fixed? People are ditching Google Drive in favor of other backup cloud solutions. I would like to find a resolution given that I use Google Drive and other backup solutions simultaneously. Does anyone have a suggested fix beyond "uninstall, and reinstall"? Reinstallation doesn't resolve the issue for me.

[k11111]

Yeah I was just on chat and they have no knowledge of the issue. i cant imagine that phone support does either. This issue has been going on for me for half a year or more, i had to get rid of the app as it doesn't work. I'm paying for a product of the rest of the year that doesn't work. Ballooning memory until my Macbook Pro slows down to almost freezing - Google Drive for Desktop consuming 100+ threads. What is happening and why has it not been addressed?

[Cyberdave3k]

I installed Drive for desktop on a Windows 10 laptop with good specs and it's doing the same thing. I "googled" for answers/fixes and I found this post and the one linked here (which is closed with no solution). It's starting to seem like it's a feature and not a bug. Unless I can find a way to reduce its priority and RAM usage, I'm going to have to use a different service. 

[dr_ge]

The excessive memory usage is because the Google Drive Desktop app is crashing, and the reason for the problem is external, not with the app itself. In my case, it turned out to be an incorrectly set up domain account, which was also slowing done or freezing other apps. When I started using a local account instead, it solved the problem, and the app now uses about 220–230 MB of RAM. It would creep up to use the entire 32 GB of RAM when run in my domain account while not being able to transfer any files between the computer and cloud.

[Belgarion66]

Regarding Google Drive for Desktop and a huge amount of RAM being used.

I had a similar issue when I migrated to a new tower pc from my 6 year old Dell laptop.  When I installed Google Drive for Desktop it setup a new folder under "Computers" in my Google Drive account, then proceeded to sync/upload my folders & files as expected.

What wasn't expected is that it quickly ran up the Virtual RAM usage... topping out at around 140 GBs (52 GB of physical RAM)!!  I have 64 GB installed.

I went through several days of killing the offending GoogleDriveFS.exe process, kicking it off before bed and letting it run overnight.  The next morning my RAM would be maxed out again and only a few hundred files had uploaded.  I needed to upload over 140k files from the local folders on this pc.  This obviously was not going to work.

I spent days trying to track down the root cause and I eventually discovered that the issue was the "Mirror files" option was selected in the parameters under "Google Drive".  I changed that to "Stream files", rebooted and have not had my memory usage climb above 820 MB since.  I have 55k files remaining and things are running smoothly.

I hope this helps someone having similar issues.

[GaetanGR]

I can confirm that this fix the issue for me, I went fron 70gb of ram to 1gb on a M2 Pro.

However the app is pretty slow and buggy from time to time, not a seamless experience...

[dr_ge]

That was one of the first things I tried. It did not work.

Again, the problem has nothing to do with the Drive app itself. It is something external that crashes the app. In my case, it was some domain setup that caused the problem.

[GaetanGR]

Well it does have something to do with the app, I used Icloud before with the same folders and never did it cause a memory leak, when you pay for a product you are not suppose to dig around to avoid your computer crashing.

[mitchmo45]

I agree, it is the app. I get the same type of memory leak on both my intel and m1pro macs. Apple support says it’s the app. Google is doing an ostrich on this issue. How can an app use 9GB of system memory in an idle state ( not syncing)??

[mitchmo45]

I ran into "out of memory" on my year old MacBook Pro , M1 pro,. 16 GB due to Drive using over 9GB (while idle). I uninstalled Drive, restarted ad downloaded a fresh Drive app. I had no memory issues without Drive for a week.  Reinstalled Drive and it is eating memory again. No issues on my Intel MacBook Air with 8GB. I am running Monterey on both. Google needs to deal with this issue. Anyone running the app in Ventura?

[GaetanGR]

Did you try this ? https://support.google.com/drive/thread/200104476/google-drive-using-up-all-ram-goes-slow-kills-macb...

[mitchmo45]

No help from the low level techs at Google. They don’t even know the difference between ram and drive space.

[flaviocunha]

I'm on the same issue here.
Macbook M1, 16GB (2020)
The Google Drive app reached 40GB of RAM used, a I have only my code projects synced (about 11GB), most of the files is lib-related files sitting on node_modules which I need to be working with.

GoogleDrive app version: 79.0 (Apple silicon)
OS: Ventura 13.3.1

[MariaLaFumada]

69 of the gb is using it google drive

[GaetanGR]

After one year, the issue is not resolved and the product is still broken ,I cancelled my subscription and move to Proton Drive (e2e).

Using that much ram will, in the long run, cut the life of your Mac since the read and write is damaging both your SSD and RAM.