cocoaforge

Is it just me, or does Adium seem to consume quite a bit of RAM. On my powerbook with 1 gig of ram, it eats about 40 Megs. I think it may be more of an OS X problem, since Mail.app eats even more, but it'd be nice if everything went down a bit.

Robert

I don't know for sure, but I would place a good deal of the blame on webkit.

rbrugman wrote:Is it just me, or does Adium seem to consume quite a bit of RAM. On my powerbook with 1 gig of ram, it eats about 40 Megs. I think it may be more of an OS X problem, since Mail.app eats even more, but it'd be nice if everything went down a bit.

Robert

Takes up about the same on my machine, with 1 gig of ram. 40 megs isn't even 4% of your ram though...is Adium using so much that other programs are choking?

Also, OS X uses more ram with the more you give it.

And remember: free ram is wasted ram!

No, it's not choking my other programs. I was just looking in the activity viewer and I noticed that it was using a bit of ram. If I had to complain it would be about Safari, with 150MB being used. I'm just used to linux servers with no gui, where using 10MB on a single app is frightening

Yeah safari uses a ton on my machine too.

Amazingly, if you create a new Cocoa project in Xcode, make no changes, and run it, it uses something like 15 MB of RAM.

Yeah OS X is quite RAM-heavy. That's why I personally recommend at least 512 MB, even though the minimum requirements are 128 MB. But you (rbrugman) said you had 1 GB of RAM, so you should have no problems in that regard. I usually have no less than 10 programs (and many more processes) running at once, and I almost never notice being out of physical RAM.

OS X is sort of RAM hungry, but part of that is because OS X caches EVERYTHING in RAM. That is, if you used it once and there's ANY possibility a program may want it again, there it stays. The OS is good about cleaning out unused data when RAM gets filled. But until then, it *appears* that you're using a lot more RAM than you really actively are.

Doesn't it cache in the cache too?

If you mean ~/Library/Caches, that's a different matter -- that's a persistent cache for programs to use across launches. For example, Safari caches images from pages you've visited so that if you ever visit that page again, it doesn't have to reload the whole image. I was speaking of things that one app uses during its time "alive" on your system -- anything cached in RAM for an app is cleaned out after it quits.

Yep, if you open activity monitor and look at the "inactive" RAM, then you will see how much RAM is there for an open process to access that it isn't actually doing anything with at the moment.

No I mean like L1, L2, L3, etc. Cache.

Sure, those are just more specific caches. They usually operate at a faster speed than RAM, so FREQUENTLY-used things are stored there.

zaudragon wrote:No I mean like L1, L2, L3, etc. Cache.

OSX has nothing to do with that, actually, so the answer is "sorta". Stuff is cached there, but by the chip, not the operating system.