I have a very strange issue, which I'm having a hard time diagnosing as to the root cause.

I have a Mac Pro (2008, 8-core 2.8 GHz, 8800GT) with 14 GB of RAM (recently upgraded because of this issue!).

When I boot my system and log in, vm_stat / top / Activity Monitor will show that kernel_task has about 150 MB allocated, and the machine has about 800 MB of Wired memory being allocated.

Even initially, 800 MB seems an awful lot of wired memory to be allocated with no applications running - but, it gets worse. (NB: Wired is locked, unswappable memory)

After a very short time, sometimes triggered by something as simple as launching a terminal, kernel_task will balloon to 8-900 MB of Real Mem (RSIZE), and Wired Memory will accelerate to 1.6 GB (implying that all the extra memory requests are for wired RAM in the kernel).

If I quit everything (I.E: no running applications, bar an activity monitor or terminal to view top), there is no appreciable reduction in either kernel_task RSIZE, or Wired Memory usage. Going the opposite way, and loading the system with tasks also shows that wired memory does not get reduced - and that importantly it is not reduced in preference to heavy swapping.

If I log out and log back in again, it reduces a bit (450 MB kernel_task, 1.28 GB Wired), but not back to the start.

I'm not running any wacky kexts - and futhermore, kextstat shows no huge memory allocations there; the largest being com.apple.nvidia.nv50hal at about 4 MB of Memory.

The machine feels overall more sluggish when this has happened - unsurprisingly because such a huge amount of RAM has been marked as non-pageable.

So I have a few questions:

1) Is there a good way to diagnose what has allocated all of this wired memory? It's often over 2 times the kernel_task size, running no applications. The real memory total doesn't seem to add up - it seems that there is a bunch of RAM that isn't being accounted for anywhere.

2) What is happening to cause the kernel to suddenly require 6 times as much memory?