A lot of programs will claim a chunk of memory to make things happen faster. Trouble is that they forget they’re on a multitasking operating system and need to share resources.
I am not an iTunes fanboy, nor FF or whatever, but using memory is what memory is designed for, in fact, unused memory is a waste.
In fact, using all available memory is a good thing (up to a certain % of the system resources). The OS should let the apps know where this ceiling lies if its a good OS.
You want your apps using a ton of memory if they are using it to make things move faster.
The only thing that is bad is when there are memory leaks, which is when the app will continue to use more and more memory even while you’re not using the application, or when it uses more memory and does not free it even though it will never be able to use that data again.
I’ll steal the square/rectangle example.
Poor memory management almost always causes high memory usage, but high memory usage is not always caused by poor memory managed applications.
For instance… if you search for something on your computer, that application will take a lot of memory. This is a very good thing because if you change the keywords a good search app should almost be able to find the next item instantly. After you close the app it should go back down.
There’s everyone’s unwanted interjection for the day…
iTunes is actually very good at being left on for a long time and using memory wisely, firefox is not though out of the two mentioned.
Trouble is if you have:
* iTunes
* Firefox
* Google Earth
up so you can do the odd curiosity search and only have 1.5GB of RAM (hi), you’re near the limit, and something has to give up a bit to let a new application in.
I know, it’ll swap out, but I want everything to be snappy. I’d rather Firefox let me say how many tabs to allocate for (the main sites I use) and swap the rest to disk so I have some physical memory left.
Fascinating – I feel like I happened upon the whiz kids campfire. All of this, added to my random computer knowledge, serves to make me more dangerous.
I suspect, the longer iTunes plays the more in will use up up to some % its deemed important. It’s arguable what is might be using that for to speed up. I/O is super slow, and playing media needs to be smooth so it likely loads each song into memory (almost guaranteed) and keeps it there for up to like X songs is my guess.
I like the way MKR put it. If you want those programs to be snappy using memory is what makes them snappy. Memory is a cache for the I/O. If swapping makes something slower, that’s because now their large memory footprint is on the disk and not in memory. If they had used less memory it would be like they are permanently swapped to disk, because they are trying to not use the memory. There is definitely a fine line between sharing and using the proper % but programs can’t read the other programs minds… so they have to guess if the OS doesn’t let them know how much to use.
in actuality that’s the allocated space that iTunes has requested, it is NOT however how much memory it’s using. You see this includes what is swapped and is NOT due to a memory leak.
A lot of programs will claim a chunk of memory to make things happen faster. Trouble is that they forget they’re on a multitasking operating system and need to share resources.
See: Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_%28Firefox%29
“It’s not our fault that you only have 1GB of RAM.”
You would think that with all the money Apple makes they could afford to hire a couple of half-decent Windows devs. APPARENTLY NOT.
try multi-tabbed browsing in firefox. BRUTAL. upwards of 500,000k sometimes!
I am not an iTunes fanboy, nor FF or whatever, but using memory is what memory is designed for, in fact, unused memory is a waste.
In fact, using all available memory is a good thing (up to a certain % of the system resources). The OS should let the apps know where this ceiling lies if its a good OS.
You want your apps using a ton of memory if they are using it to make things move faster.
The only thing that is bad is when there are memory leaks, which is when the app will continue to use more and more memory even while you’re not using the application, or when it uses more memory and does not free it even though it will never be able to use that data again.
I’ll steal the square/rectangle example.
Poor memory management almost always causes high memory usage, but high memory usage is not always caused by poor memory managed applications.
For instance… if you search for something on your computer, that application will take a lot of memory. This is a very good thing because if you change the keywords a good search app should almost be able to find the next item instantly. After you close the app it should go back down.
There’s everyone’s unwanted interjection for the day…
iTunes is actually very good at being left on for a long time and using memory wisely, firefox is not though out of the two mentioned.
Trouble is if you have:
* iTunes
* Firefox
* Google Earth
up so you can do the odd curiosity search and only have 1.5GB of RAM (hi), you’re near the limit, and something has to give up a bit to let a new application in.
I know, it’ll swap out, but I want everything to be snappy. I’d rather Firefox let me say how many tabs to allocate for (the main sites I use) and swap the rest to disk so I have some physical memory left.
I suspect this was due to a memory leak. I’ve had iTunes open for a couple hours and it’s at 45MB. That screenshot was after about 7 hours of playing.
Fascinating – I feel like I happened upon the whiz kids campfire. All of this, added to my random computer knowledge, serves to make me more dangerous.
I suspect, the longer iTunes plays the more in will use up up to some % its deemed important. It’s arguable what is might be using that for to speed up. I/O is super slow, and playing media needs to be smooth so it likely loads each song into memory (almost guaranteed) and keeps it there for up to like X songs is my guess.
I like the way MKR put it. If you want those programs to be snappy using memory is what makes them snappy. Memory is a cache for the I/O. If swapping makes something slower, that’s because now their large memory footprint is on the disk and not in memory. If they had used less memory it would be like they are permanently swapped to disk, because they are trying to not use the memory. There is definitely a fine line between sharing and using the proper % but programs can’t read the other programs minds… so they have to guess if the OS doesn’t let them know how much to use.
A program like Firefox could easily figure out how many tabs to allocate for. Just take the 5-7 most-visited pages and allocate some memory to them.
Then increase memory for other sites as you use them, and deallocate after inactivity.
Right now it’s taking a fixed % and not doing any kind of predictive allocation.
in actuality that’s the allocated space that iTunes has requested, it is NOT however how much memory it’s using. You see this includes what is swapped and is NOT due to a memory leak.
learn how memory works on your computer.