You may remember our discussion of RAM (Random Access Memory) in class. We discussed how any programming that is running, whether you are using it or not, takes up space in RAM. And the more programs you open, the more space gets taken up. Eventually, as RAM fills to capacity and the machine has to start using hard drive space to store program data your PC will start so stutter and slow, possibly even crash. Of course, if you close some programs – [Control]-[Shift]-[Escape] all held down at once will show all running processes – you will free up the space in memory that they were using and your machine will spring back to life.

However, we also talked about what are known as memory leaks. A misnomer to be certain, because they refer to a program *not* releasing memory once it’s shot down, sometimes even continuing to fill it! I also mentioned that the Firefox browser has one of the worst memory leaks I’ve ever experienced. Well, just to prove the point, Firefox crashed on me over the weekend and when I checked the process list arranged by memory used, look who was right at the top:

Look at that huge number! To make matters worse, not only is it double the memory usage of Internet Explorer, you’ll notice the column header shows the word ‘Private’ in parentheses after ‘Memory.’ That means ‘Private Working Memory’ and that is memory that is not useable, not shareable, by other process. Firefox has hogged it all to itself!

I’d be interested to know who among you actively read and post, so here’s the task for all of you. Bring up the process list for your OS (Instructions on how to do that are at the end of this post) and indcate the program that is using the most memory and how much it is using, and the program that is using the *second* highest amount of memory, and how much it is using. Put your results in the comments, an we’ll see if there are any memory hogs among your programs!

How to determine memory usage of programs:

WINDOWS:
Hold down the Control, Shift, and Escape key all at once to bring up process explorer. Clicking on the ‘Memory’ column heading will arrange programs by memory usage.

MAC (From Apple’s own site):
For Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 or later, open Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/).

For Mac OS X 10.2.8 or earlier, open ProcessViewer (/Applications/Utilities/). Mac OS X processes and applications are listed in main window.

In Mac OS X 10.3.9 and earlier, the “% Memory” column indicates the percentage of RAM in use by an application or process at the time of sampling.

In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you can see the overall percentages of memory in use or idle at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window.