On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, Seth R Arnold wrote: > Heh, netscape is a bit of a memory hog. After running it for a few days, I > have seen it eating more than 60megs -- even with only one window open. I > understand that calls to free the memory don't always make the OS actually > reclaim it -- which makes sense, in some senses, but .. I don't want to > restart netscape every few days just to reclaim memory..
It's not that Netscape's free calls con't reclaim the memory, it's more that Netscape makes more malloc() calls than free() calls. It allocates the memory and doesn't give it back. Memory that is freed will be reused by the application that originally allocated it. Memory that is never freed, though, can't be reused - by anybody - until the application exits.
