Cocoa® Programming

Using Memory Zones

Memory zones are a technique that can be used to improve application performance. Memory zones optimize the location of memory for objects that are used together. The use of memory zones is the final wrinkle to Cocoa memory management.

Each application for Mac OS X has a very large amount of addressable memory. Each time an application requests more memory, the operating system provides memory even if all available RAM in the computer is already in use. To accommodate the application’s request for memory, the operating system copies the contents of some RAM to the computer’s hard disk. The operating system then makes the copied RAM available to the requesting application to reuse. When the memory that was copied to disk is ...