Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Quitting apps when through using, a good habit?

Over the years, I have developed the habit of quitting applications when through using them. But I have read that with the advent of OS X, and modern memory allocation, this is unnecessary.

To quit apps when finished, or not, that is the question. Do slings and arrows await fools such as I, or will grace and mercy still smile on me were I to allow apps to run?

What say, ye wise brethren and cistern?

Quitting Safari periodically is a good idea, because despite the fact that its memory leak is apparently history it remains something of a RAM hog; 500Mb is common in my experience.

I don't quit my other apps, because they don't use enough RAM to bother either me or my deuced Mac(hina)'s performance. (Well... I do relaunch Finder every once in a while when it gets over 125Mb, but that's really just for aesthetic purposes.)

For me it depends on the application. I've never had what you'd call copious RAM in any Mac, so perhaps my sensitivity is greater than that of most folks, but I don't think I've ever used a browser whose performance didn't slowly degrade over time, and for which a relaunch didn't restore a snappiness that merely deleting history and emptying caches couldn't fully regain.

I routinely have Activity Monitor running in the background, and I've noticed that after extensive uptime, Firefox in particular gets into a spinning beachball mode, even when CPU usage (which is usually highly correlated with the spinning beachball) isn't excessively high; restarting the application makes this problem go away.

Ironically, though, my practice is more one of quitting apps when not through, in order to improve app performance, than of quitting apps when through in order to improve system performance. Of course, it might be argued that periodic quitting/relaunching of applications whose performance tends to degrade over time would be a good preemptive measure...

Thanks for the feedback/insight guys.

I knew about the memory leak in Safari, but often wondered why, after all theses years, that cursed condition persists.

Me thinks I'll be a bit more circumspect re quitting apps, at least until I learn which ones are having a detrimental affect on system performance.