On Nov 6, 2012, at 1:13 PM, William Sumner wrote: > On Nov 6, 2012, at 8:08 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. Plus, if you're booting off, or have your swap file on an SSD disk >> related performance penalties will be much less than if using an HD to hold >> the swap file. > > Memory remains the target of much superstition. The OS will take care of > managing memory--you don't need to do it. Common utilities like Activity > Monitor and Task Manager have given micro-managing users an excuse to > second-guess their OS, which is rarely wise. > > Preston >
The only reason I resorted to this was because of performance issues. If Safari is running, and a large amount of memory is used up, it's most likely in pages or images that are running in Safari that are behind what I am looking at. Many might be images that have come and gone that are not needed by pages any more, but according to the memory model, they are still needed. But, as the user of the system, I don't care, unless Safari is in the foreground and I am looking at the page/tab which needs allocated items. This is where a purge is useful. I'm telling the system to push away the items that I don't care about. At times, I have tested issuing a SIGSTOP and a SIGCONT to Safari as the app goes to the goes to the background and comes to the front and simply by pausing the app, performance on my system (quad core i7 MBP, 16 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD) improves. The GUI becomes more snappy. This also happens when temporarily disabling JavaScript. Also, there is some interaction between dock widgets and Safari that I don't understand that is related to performance and memory where if I kill the dock, performance of the whole system picks up and the Activity Monitor blinkenlights memory readout frees up a few gig. In fact I just issued a purge and got about a gig back from Safari. Sure, it's running and items are allocated as being used, but all of that isn't needed at once. I find that, at least when Safari and webkit is involved, the OS's memory management doesn't take in to effect that many of the opened windows and tabs do not need to have the same high priority as other applications and memory management doesn't handle making non front pages and tabs second class citizens fast enough. Just my experience though. _______________________________________________ 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
