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Memory Warning

By now many of you (assuming you own Yummy!) will have seen the above warning message. Why are you getting it and what does it really mean? That’s what this post hopes to answer.

The first thing to note is that the error message is being completely honest. The iPhone has told Yummy that it is running out of memory and that if nothing changes it will be shutdown without warning.

Does that not mean that Yummy is being incredibly wasteful? How could it possibly be using 8Gb of memory just to display a webpage? The answer to that is, it’s not that memory that is being depleted. In order to run programs the iPhone has around 128Mb of memory, less than 30Mb of which is available to third-party applications like Yummy. The number on the box, the 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb sizes, are a different “pot” that cannot be used for the same purpose.

So, the first thing that Yummy does when it starts running out of memory is to “forget” about as much stuff as possible that it doesn’t currently need. This means that the number of bookmarks in your Delicious account has little bearing on how much memory is used.

Jettisoning this temporary data is typically enough to allow the webpage to load. However if you’re loading a particularly large or complicated page it might not be and, unfortunately, Yummy often does not get a second warning before being forced out.

This is one of those rare cases where I’ve had to let some of the underlying technical details show through. It’s not ideal but I thought it better that you know what’s going on rather than just allow it to exit without warning.