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. —Jens _______________________________________________ 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
