Re: a way to clear inactive RAM
Re: a way to clear inactive RAM
- Subject: Re: a way to clear inactive RAM
- From: Alex Zavatone <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:35:03 -0500
On Nov 6, 2012, at 1:05 PM, Fritz Anderson wrote:
> On 6 Nov 2012, at 11:30 AM, Jens Alfke <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 6, 2012, at 7:08 AM, Alex Zavatone <email@hidden> 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.
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