[adamnemecek]

What I hate about Preview on macOS is that all opened PDFs are kept in memory as opposed to freeing up the memory when the PDF is not active.

Look I know that I probably should not have 200 PDFs open, but Preview should not be consuming 40GB of memory.

[crazygringo]

That's... not how programs usually work. You open something, it's in memory.

Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.

On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?

[adamnemecek]

> That's... not how programs usually work. You open something, it's in memory.

What are you talking about? UPDF does it just fine https://updf.com/updf-mac-user-guide/preferences-mac/#3

> Yeah, you shouldn't have 200 PDFs open.

Nah.

> On the other hand, the good news is your Mac still runs fine, consuming 40GB of "memory" even if you've only got 8GB. Since it's just putting it all out to swap on a fast SSD. So why even complain?

I'm aware, however it only works like this in theory. In practice, if the Preview gets to like 60GB, the whole system will get slow until I close it.

[seemaze]

As someone who routinely switches between multi-gigabyte PDF files, I appreciate that they all stay loaded in memory. Ain't nobody got time to re-render and re-index those files every time I switch documents..

[adamnemecek]

Ok, it should be an option.

[243524352435]

Wait until it's doing OCR on your 200 open PDF files...

Takes a while to finish, with the CPU going into overdrive.

But hey, it's useful when you want to Cmd-F through a bunch of scanned pixels.

:-)