Terminal fiends will likely find this post useful.
A while ago, I was sitting in the library at the University of Florida under the pretense of preparing for a final exam that was scheduled for the following day. I had, however, made the idiotic mistake of bringing my laptop with me.
Instead of studying I became inexplicably fascinated with how much memory my various running applications were taking up. Actually, it was really the fault of Alex Harper’s fantastic MenuMeters application, because I noticed that I was running low on free memory, despite having 2 gigabytes installed and very few applications running.
This lead to another discovery, namely that Safari was hording over a gigabyte of RAM for itself. This upset me, as I’m rather neurotic about how much RAM applications use. Every time the OS has to pageout I cringe inside with the knowledge that my laptop’s battery life, performance, and theoretically, the lifespan of its hard drive, are all affected. So I set aside the textbook and wrote memusage, a shell script that reports back the largest of offenders:
gslepak$ memusage Top 10 memory intensive apps: Name Percentage Size #1: Xcode 5.3 217.688 MB #2: firefox-bin 4.4 181.754 MB #3: WindowServer 4.1 165.961 MB #4: Finder 2.3 95.2305 MB #5: iTunes 2.0 81.7227 MB #6: Mail 1.8 75.7031 MB #7: Interface 1.7 67.7344 MB #8: coreservicesd 1.3 53.1914 MB #9: mds 1.1 45.0312 MB #10: Quicksilver 0.9 38.4531 MB
As you can see, I don’t use Safari anymore. 😛
I wonder what iSpy is using right now…
gslepak$ memusage ispy ispyd: 0.0 % 0.441406 MB
Ten is too many, just show me the top 5:
gslepak$ memusage 5 Top 5 memory intensive apps: Name Percentage Size #1: Xcode 5.3 217.688 MB #2: firefox-bin 4.5 182.457 MB #3: WindowServer 4.1 166.281 MB #4: Finder 2.3 95.2305 MB #5: iTunes 2.0 81.7227 MB
If you’re wondering why the percentages don’t match up with 2GB, it’s because I recently upgraded to 4GB, and I highly recommend it!
Dude. That is COOL… and useful.
Thanks!