On Nov 6, 2012, at 1:05 PM, Fritz Anderson wrote: > On 6 Nov 2012, at 11:30 AM, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: > >> On Nov 6, 2012, at 7:08 AM, Alex Zavatone <z...@mac.com> wrote: >> >>> Actually, that's not always the case. As I use Safari through out the day, >>> Safari ends up eating 6 to 12 GB of data on my 16 GB system. Frequently, I >>> need to issue a purge to get back a spare GB or few hundred MB >> >> If that actually gets you back memory, it’s just because Safari has marked >> some of its allocated address space as ‘purgeable’. You would have gotten >> that space back if it became necessary anyway, without the need to do >> anything explicit, because the kernel will start tossing out purgeable >> address space as needed to free up space for new allocations. >> >> The basic principle is, don’t second-guess the kernel, at least not unless >> you know its architecture really well or have read through Singh’s “Mac OS X >> Internals” book :) In my experience, Activity Monitor’s pie charts of system >> memory usage are nice as blinkenlights but nearly useless for any practical >> purpose of mine. > > I understand that this is what is supposed to happen, and I do believe that > smart people with good intentions have worked to make it happen. > > But it often happens that when Activity Monitor's pie chart shows no free > RAM, my computer becomes sluggish. It rarely happens that when my computer is > sluggish, Activity Monitor shows free RAM. It's not 1:1, and maybe I'm a > victim of confirmation bias, but that's my experience. > > — F
Exactly the same condition happens here, which is why I ended up resorting to the purge command. Most (all) of the memory bloat and performance problems that come with it that I have on my system is due to Safari and I've narrowed it down to a few things previously mentioned. If only I could get in the habit of using another browser. Even with disabling Flash and as many superfluous graphics, it's still the #1 memory pig on my system. Disabling Javascript certainly helps. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
