Early today I was noticing my laptop acting sluggish when I was trying to wake it up from screen saver and/or sleeping. That kind of bugged me – this is a brand new 1 GHz machine, faster than any computing device I’ve ever owned. By using the “top” program, I could see that all available memory was used up, which is why it was sluggish. What programs were the big offenders? Shrook was using 85 M of RAM, and Safari was using 57 M. Yowza. I saw that with Shrook on my older, slower and less RAM desktop that in about 8 hours the machine would be unusable. Now it appears like I’m going to have to restart the program ever day or two or else it will consume all available resources. Sigh. I really want to like this program. Having the iBook with me all day and with Shrook getting new articles whenever I have network connections really is quite spiffy and I like it. I just want this damn program to do the simple things acceptably, like run for more than a day without consuming all my RAM.
Safari wasn’t getting as out of control as fast, but this memory usage is still unacceptable. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned use of a memory profiler and leak checker? Neither of these programs is brand new. Surely somewhere in the last few years there have been opportunities to examine whether or not they leaked memory like sieves. I really hate it when I upgrade to a faster machine, and because of the sluggish bloated software it feels absoutely no faster than the old ones.
