[OS X TeX] PDFKit - memory leak or memory hog?

[riseguin at earthlink.net]

> On Oct 24, 2015, at 11:47 AM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I saw someone on the net complaining that since they updated to El Capitan, Preview seems to have acquired a memory leak and was consuming large amounts of RAM, especially with multiple documents open. They claimed that Skim had the same problem. They didn’t mention TeXShop, but I assumed that it would have the same problem if the other two did. I’m running El Capitan myself, so I checked it out.
> 
> I just opened a single 189 page, 1.5MB, PDF document with Skim, and Skim was initially consuming around 50MB. As I paged through the document one page at a time, the RAM usage kept increasing with each page, and when I hit the end, Skim was consuming an astounding 726MB. It did drop back down to 50MB when I closed the document, so it isn’t clear to me if this is actually technically a memory leak problem, or that this is a massive memory hog problem.
> 
> Richard Séguin

It could be that PDFKit is intentionally caching every page “image” that it displays, so that it can do less work the next time the page is viewed. However, if it has to consume that much memory, it is not a good strategy.

It was also reported that Adobe Reader did not have this problem.

Richard Séguin