OW using WAY too much RAM

[Gregory Block]

On Friday, January 4, 2002, at 06:56 PM, johnathan spectre wrote:
> One thing I'll say is if you are used to applications in OS X 
> having OS 9 sized memory partitions you need to rethink things. 
> Applications under X suck up a lot more RAM due to all the extra 
> bells, whistles and graphics of X. Windows cost a lot more in RAM 
> usage and CPU time to draw, don't think Aqua comes cheap. 100M of 
> RAM for OmniWeb to render  a few web pages beautifully is nothing. 
> Think Netscape 4.x would render them as well in 1/2 the memory and 
> not bug? Let's add in the advanced features of OW and that it's 
> not some 1/2 baked "carbon" app.

Everyone needs to keep in mind that this includes the rendering 
area's backing store and all of the graphics for the screen, now - 
so these numbers aren't actually realistic determiners of how much 
is actually being used by the application at any one point in 
time.  Also, some of those libraries are shared across the system - 
and yet each application shows that as being used within its own 
space, because it's memory-mapped into the space; that same memory, 
for any other library, is also mapped into other processes, yet it 
only *really* exists as a single entity.

Those numbers are misleading, to the unaware.  Those of us with 
Unix or NeXT backgrounds should ensure that we explain that fact to 
people whenever possible - they read much more like stereo 
instructions than the first glance at those numbers would have you 
believe.