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
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