Why does GrowlMenu use 8 GB of memory?
It doesn’t. You’re almost certainly talking about the “VSIZE” number in top (or, on Leopard, the “Virtual Memory” number in Activity Monitor). That number is nearly meaningless; it includes much more memory than what the application has actually allocated. Specifically, it indicates the full size of the process’s address space, not how much of that space it’s actually using. GrowlMenu, starting in version 1.2, uses the garbage collection feature introduced in Leopard. The garbage collector reserves 8 GB of address space for future use, but it does not allocate the memory. Thus, it gets counted under VSIZE, but GrowlMenu is not actually using it, and does not have that memory allocated to it. (The vmmap tool will show the memory as “unallocated”.) In simple terms, GrowlMenu 1.2’s address space (on 64-bit Macs) is over 8 GB, but there’s an 8 GB hole in the middle. This is just how the garbage collector works; it is not a problem and not a bug in either the GC or GrowlMenu. The above also
