5.7 and memory management
 

So, I'm still having issues with watching YouTube/Flash videos, but I have a Konfabulator widget that shows free memory which I use to monitor memory usage, and I've noticed something interesting.

During normal browsing, my Mac sits at about 2/3rds(in my case, round about 530MB ) free memory. Then OW crashes and I see that the free memory is down to about 1/3rd(usually down to 220MB ).

I can surf all day long sometimes, and it takes forever for the free memory to get that low. Or I can view some YouTube vids and the free memory drops like a rock. Also, if I leave OW to it's self, and go make dinner or something, and comeback, the memory has dropped way down, with no dynamic pages(other than Gmail ) in my tab set.

I can surf all day long with Safari, and never have that problem. Videos or not.

Any suggestions?

SC

Take a look at [url]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918[/url]

[i]Should you be worried if your computer only has 10 MB of "Free" memory? Probably not.[/i]

Thank you for the link Forrest, but my computer still crashes at 230 MB of free memory. And this only happens in OW and not Safari. Which is to not say that Safari won't continue to consume memory, but it won't crash/lock-up-the-system when the free memory reaches that level.

SC

Have you asked for feedback on the crash reports you've sent in? Often they'll tell you what it was related to. Then you'd know for sure if them memory issue is the problem.

Actually, they just sent me a reply to one of the many crash reports and saying it's a Flash problem, and not much that they can do for it.

SC

[QUOTE=Smithcraft;35723]Actually, they just sent me a reply to one of the many crash reports and saying it's a Flash problem, and not much that they can do for it.

SC[/QUOTE]

Well, it seems to be at least one browser that doesn't have this life or death dependency lock in with Flash. Since it happens to be the one with very much the same code base as OmniWeb I have difficulties to believe this is the best explanation for the problem with the crashes. If I'm not missing something here, you are saying these crashes also appear without any Flash stuff loaded at all? If that's what you mean you could try the suggestion about asking for a comment, on a non Flash related crash report.

Here's how the plugin can cause us to crash:

Browser plugins have all the bad features of the memory system that OS 9 and earlier used, where apps could write information willy-nilly all over each other's memory.

We actually load browser plugins into our own address space; we give it a chunk of memory and trust it to stay within those boundaries. Sometimes it doesn't do so, unfortunately.

If a problem occurs in the plugin, all we get is a message from the system that says "hey, the plugin just wrote information outside of the space it was supposed to; I'm shutting it down." The plugin goes bye-bye, but we have to assume that the plugin just corrupted the information we stored in our own memory.

At that point, we have no good option other than to crash, or even worse things would happen down the line. (Say the plugin just wrote over the memory that we're using to store your bookmarks; you don't want that saved back out to disk when we shut down...)

From checking with the dev team, pretty much every browser operates this way and have this vulnerability.

[QUOTE=Smithcraft;35723]Actually, they just sent me a reply to one of the many crash reports and saying it's a Flash problem, and not much that they can do for it.

SC[/QUOTE]

I'm having some trouble locating your crash reports in the system - they don't appear to have been sent from the same email address used to subscribe to the forum - but I wouldn't assume that all the crashes are caused by the exact same thing. It may be just that particular crash that we responded to which was a flash problem.

If you send me a private message with the email address your reports came from, I can have a look. (Alternatively, you can post the ticket numbers in this thread, if you still have the auto-responses that get sent back.)

[QUOTE=Brian;35751]Here's how the plugin can cause us to crash:

Browser plugins have all the bad features of the memory system that OS 9 and earlier used, where apps could write information willy-nilly all over each other's memory.

We actually load browser plugins into our own address space; we give it a chunk of memory and trust it to stay within those boundaries. Sometimes it doesn't do so, unfortunately.

If a problem occurs in the plugin, all we get is a message from the system that says "hey, the plugin just wrote information outside of the space it was supposed to; I'm shutting it down." The plugin goes bye-bye, but we have to assume that the plugin just corrupted the information we stored in our own memory.

At that point, we have no good option other than to crash, or even worse things would happen down the line. (Say the plugin just wrote over the memory that we're using to store your bookmarks; you don't want that saved back out to disk when we shut down...)

From checking with the dev team, pretty much every browser operates this way and have this vulnerability.[/QUOTE]

Hey Brian, thanks so much for that info. It really helps. You guys should add stuff like that to the FAQ portion of this forum. Very, VERY helpful.

First, the email is sent to Omni, and the emails sent back all go to the address that is in my profile. Although before March, they would have been from the ISP domain, which sadly is comcast.

Second, I can watch YouTube vids for some time in Safari, and not have the whole computer lock up. Where as with OW, it might just crash OW on the first video, or the tenth. Sometimes it just dumps OW, and sometimes it's a forced restart of the system. If it's the latter then I get that stupid 'Global History - can't do anything till you make a choice deal' which is super annoying.