I think the current mac version of ExifTool has a quite nasty memory leak. I'm using ExifTool as an external tool for an another application called FileTrain and when using stations that involve ExifTool i can only process about 10 files before the main application uses 2 - 3 GB of RAM. Normally this software uses about 190 MB of RAM.
The software developer for my main application means that this is an ExifTool issue.
When using ExifTool in AppleScripts i have not experienced this issue but i'll guess that this is because ExifTool is terminated when my shell script is executed.
Interesting.
From a Terminal window in OS X 10.10.5 running Perl 5.12.4, I tried using ExifTool to extract information from a large number of different files (keeping ExifTool open the whole time using the -stay_open feature) and the memory usage never went above 57 MB.
Can you confirm this problem running from a Terminal window? It may be a problem with how the main application handles memory.
- Phil
I'm not familiar with Perl so i did a simple AppleScript and processed 500+ files and could not see any major memory usage, i will forward your answer to the software company.