An Experiment in Bloggery

Big news for Mac gaming today. Return to Dark Castle has finally been released for OS X! This game has been in development for about 7 years now, and it should be very familiar to anybody who played Mac games 15-20 years ago. Heck, I’m only 22 and I remember Beyond Dark Castle.

Can anybody explain what’s going on with that memory usage? I’ve been seeing this for a few months now. These days I tend to restart a handful of apps at least once a day (sometimes more often) to combat this apparent memory problem. I’ve tried just ignoring it, but my system also tends to become less responsive over time, especially when accessing apps that I haven’t used in the last few minutes, so I can only assume that apps are getting paged out frequently. Running sysctl vm.swapusage seems to bear that out as well, at the moment I’m using 1.6GiB and when I checked 2 days ago (before a reboot) I was using close to 3GiB (quitting apps brought that down to about 2.2GiB). Unfortunately I can’t seem to get anywhere on figuring out what’s going on with all this memory. If I run vmmap on one of these processes I just see a lot of malloc blocks.