OW using WAY too much RAM

[Bill Chin]

On Saturday, January 5, 2002, at 01:47  PM, Stephen Chu wrote:

> I don't mind OW uses more memory when it is working. What bothers me and
> most other people here is it has significant memory leaks. That is the
> memory size it takes does not come back down when all windows are 
> closed and
> it's not doing anything. This make me constantly relaunch OW after a few
> hours of surfing.

I've never had to actually restart OmniWeb due to excessive VM usage... 
if OmniWeb retained memory that it wasn't using, then the operating 
system would then page that out to disk at some point and it won't be 
paged back. It shouldn't be a problem until OmniWeb hits the per process 
memory limit. In reality, OmniWeb crashes way before that happens. :) 
There is also a timed cache as well as history tracking involved that 
will probably retain some additional memory.


> BTW, Cocoa and Carbon, in their current state, both are "1/2 baked". If 
> you
> followed this list closely, you will know even OmniWeb makes use of a 
> lot of
> Carbon calls. And if not for Carbon, OW won't be so multi-language 
> friendly.
> Heck, even the OS itself relies on Carbon to work. ie. you can only 
> write
> input methods in Carbon.

Sure... Apple left a lot of API coverage without Cocoa wrappers... for 
example, Keychain doesn't have a Cocoa counterpart. That definitely 
dilutes some of the advantages of OPENSTEP - for example, all apps used 
the same Font Panel so that there was very good consistency. Also, don't 
equate non-Cocoa == Carbon. Cocoa is a high level API that hides a lot 
of lower level stuff.  Finally, remember that Cocoa's predecessors were 
hosted by non-Carbon environments like Solaris, NeXTSTEP, and Microsoft 
Windows. So the Carbon requirement is an engineering decision in the 
current Mac OS X, where the term Carbon often is used to refer to 
anything that doesn't come from the BSD/CoreOS side and not Cocoa, some 
of which were written new for Mac OS X. So it's a complex weave. Plus, 
Cocoa's ancestors had very good multi-language support before it was put 
into what became Mac OS X.

..Bill Chin
M Dimension Technology