Reduce memory usage

[zexpe]

Hi there,

I'm currently on my 30-day free trial of Viscosity as a replacement for Tunnelblick on my Mac. I've noticed that on a fresh reboot Viscosity is the application using the highest amount of memory on my computer - even higher than Finder - at 57MB. This is compared to the 15MB occupied by Tunnelblick. I like the idea of using a paid app to support developers and in return receive frequent updates and support, but I dislike even more the propensity of Mac OS X helper/background applications to consume > 50 MB of memory. It's not uncommon to find users with up to 20 such applications running on login, which would consume a gigabyte of memory in total if they were all this large.

Is this something you can look into and is there any chance Viscosity's memory footprint could be reduced?

Thank you for your time.

[James]

Hi zexpe,

Much of Viscosity is built using the Cocoa-Python (PyObjC) libraries, which is what the memory difference can be attributed too. However Viscosity uses only a small fraction of these libraries, so when Mac OS X is running low on memory most of this memory usage will be moved to Virtual Memory, freeing up RAM. Basically, it'll take the physical memory if it is available, however free it up if something else needs it, so I wouldn't worry too much.

Python allows us to more easily maintain code-bases for both Mac and Windows versions, however we have slowly been converting some of the more performance-heavy code to ObjC for improved performance and memory usage. However I don't see Viscosity ditching Cocoa-Python until we've transitioned to a plugin-style architecture, which is still a long way off.

Cheers,
James