Firstly, I opened the two links provided my mrpasini and scrolled down until I saw the word "memory" or "ram" and that's why I say that those quotes came from those pages. If people here want to say that I provided irrelevant links or the wrong links I'll just let my quotes about memory and ram from those pages speak for themselves. I won't argue this. The quotes I gave are from those pages.
???
Well, just click your links here and you’ll see what I meant.
But that’s OK, with the help of the forum’s in-page search I found the right posts. So everything fine.
The Preferences page shows about 17 variables per screen, and I count about 48 screens, so that's 800 variables.
Not sure what you mean with screen. To quickly count the variables, just select the whole variable list (⌘A), and copy/paste into a text editor that shows you the number of lines.
Are you suggesting that if I delete some variables the leak will stop?
No. As mentioned, which such an amount of variables it might just be a bit difficult to keep the overview.
although they may get recreated when the macros run
Exactly. Normally you can delete almost all variables, maybe except for some that hold some complicated macro settings. And if you’ve started to use more local variables, then you will have seen that global (=persistent) variables are pretty rarely necessary.
I don't recall clipboards being discussed before. I'm not sure if I've ever used them, other than perhaps by accident or while experimenting. I think I have only a couple of them.
They are also in the Preferences, the tab just to the left of the variables. Basically clipboards are also variables, but they can be larger, because they can hold other stuff than only text.
Another thing you could do, is checking the size of your variables database (~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro/Keyboard Maestro Variables.sqlite).
I can live with this minor issue.
I wouldn’t call this a minor issue.
I don't think I transferred any macros electronically from my old to new computer.
Well, this makes the story really weird. I don’t see any pattern then, that could explain why you have this issue over several years. Because if you had a very buggy macro, chances are rather low that you will copy the exact bugs when re-writing the macro on your new Mac, no? (But it can’t be excluded, of course.)
But I did point out that even when all my macros are disabled I can cause the memory leak to go to 3GB in a very short time just by clicking on buttons in the editor.
Yes. Here and there you said “with all macros disabled”, then you said (in the same post) “I have every group disabled”.
You know that also a macro in a disabled group (and even a disabled macro) can perfectly be executed, for example by another macro.
So, disabling a group (or a macro) does not automatically prevent a buggy macro from causing havoc.
But, somehow, I don’t think, this is it.
You have the memory issue with image actions, you had the issue while running JavaScript, you have the issue when only enabling/disabling groups. The issue seems to be hardware-independent and OS-independent, and it goes away when doing nothing with KM.
Well, I think, I can’t help you much here. But I’m very curious to learn what you’ll find out.
Maybe it helps, next time when the memory footprint goes up to several GB, to make a sample (via Activity Monitor) and send it to @peternlewis . (?)
I guess, the Engine log files, you have already checked?
PS:
Just in case you have any weird anti-virus software running, then I would disable it and see if it changes something.