An anonymous tipster sent in the following tidbit:
With top running in terminal, I was looking at the amount of memory consumed by the Finder. I observed that when cycling through a Folder with pictures (.bmp, .tiff) and preview is on, the Finder consumes a lot of memory and does not release it. By cycling with the arrow keys through some folders, the Finder consumed more than 500MB of memory. In order to release the memory, I had to do a kill -9 for the Finder process.I was intrigued and did some similar experiments on my machine. Here are a few key columns from the "top" output for the Finder at a normal usage level, about 30 minutes after startup:
PID COMMAND %CPU RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE SIZEI then browsed a few of my iPhoto archive folders in column-view mode with preview enabled (I did this for no more than a minute or so), and re-ran top. I was quite surprised to see:
484 Finder 0.0% 5.83M 27.9M 30.7M 153M
PID COMMAND %CPU RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE SIZEI went back to my normal routine and checked "top" again about 45 minutes later and found that, as the tipster claimed, the memory had not been released.
484 Finder 0.0% 540M 18.5M 66.9M 776M
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