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Introduction to Memory Usage Performance Guidelines

Contents:

Organization of This Document

Analyzing your memory usage is one way to fix other performance problems you may have, such as an increased code footprint or slow code. Efficient memory usage is critical to performance in any application. Increased memory usage not only increases the in-memory footprint of your application, it also increases the time spent allocating and manipulating that memory.

Organization of This Document

This programming topic includes the following articles:

• “Memory Management in Mac OS X” introduces terminology and provides a high-level overview of the Mac OS X virtual memory system.

• “Optimizing Your Memory Allocations” describes the best techniques for allocating, initializing, and copying memory.

• “Examining Memory Allocation Patterns” describes the tools and techniques for analyzing your application’s memory usage.

• “Finding Memory Leaks” describes the tools and techniques for finding memory leaks in your application.

• “Enabling the Malloc Debugging Features” describes the environment variables used to enable malloc history logging. You must set some of these variables before using some of the memory analysis tools.

• “Viewing Virtual Memory Usage” describes the tools and techniques for analyzing your application’s in-memory footprint.

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