High memory usage in the client software

Activity Monitor on macOS is showing high memory usage for the PaperCut User Client.

When looking at the Activity Monitor in macOS, at first glance it can appear that the PaperCut User Client is using a massive amount of memory - e.g. 5GB or 10GB.

What we’ve found is that this normally happens on machines which have been up and running for long periods of time with the user client software running constantly. However, don’t be alarmed - because the huge total that you’re seeing is not the amount of memory in use!

There are some great rabbit holes to dive down exploring the differences in memory types in macOS, like here or here, but in short the ‘memory’ column that you see by default is a sum of a number of different types of memory statistics in play.

To get a ‘real’ view of what’s going on, right click on the column headings in Activity Monitor, and check the Real Memory column. That column will show you the amount of memory that the PaperCut client is actually using, and is normally vastly lower - around the 150MB mark.

Sadly the above gif doesn’t show a ‘huge’ difference, but it does illustrate how to view the ‘real memory’ column in Activity Monitor. We have seen differences as much as 10GB in the different memory types.