Memory usage of GNUstep processes

[Andreas Höschler]

Hi all,

I have a general memory usage question regarding GNUstep applications. 
My app allows users to fetch objects from a database. The fetched raw 
data is converted to Objective-C objects in memory. These objects are 
held in a dic. As the user continues to do fetches the memory usages of 
the process goes up:

prstat
   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
 27357 paravici  423M  414M sleep   59    0   0:36:36 0.6% SmartClient/1
...

So far that is what I would expect. However, if the user closes the 
form the dic and all the Objective-C objects are released. I would 
expect memory usage to go down to 100M or so but it stays at 423M. I 
have made sure that dealloc on the objects is called.

Shouldn't the process return memory to the operation system so that we 
see decreased figures in prstat? I am seeing this on Solaris 10. I have 
no idea whether this is Solaris or GNustep related or a general memory 
management issue under Unix operating systems.

Thanks for you hints!

  Andreas