Question about Freeing up Memory

[snverhallen]

I just used iFreeMem to optimize my memory and to my amazement it increased my free RAM from 200 MB to over 600MB.

My question is how can it do that, and why doesn't OS X do it automatically?

snverhallen

 

[BobZune]

Memory management is an important and big topic. If you want to learn more, see

http://developer.apple.com/mac/libr...tual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html

and

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20010613140025184

for starters, then do more research.

The memory optimization is best left to the Operating System -- the designers are pretty smart and make various tradeoffs (e.g., reboot, start a program, measure time it takes to start; quit the program and restart the program and measure how long it takes -- this tells you keeping a recently used program in memory can be useful). If use iFreeMem makes you happy, keep using it as long as it doesn't lead to system instability.