Mac OS memory management

Historically, the classic Mac OS used a form of memory management that has fallen out of favor in modern systems. Criticism of this approach was one of the key areas addressed by the change to .

The original problem for the engineers of the Macintosh was how to make optimum use of the 128 KB of RAM with which the machine was equipped, on Motorola 68000-based computer hardware that did not support virtual memory. Since at that time the machine could only run one application program at a time, and there was no fixed secondary storage, the engineers implemented a simple scheme which worked well with those particular constraints. That design choice did not scale well with the development of the machine, creating various difficulties for both programmers and users.

Fragmentation

The primary concern of the original engineers appears to have been fragmentation – that is, the repeated allocation and deallocation of memory through pointers leading to many small isolated areas of memory which cannot be used because they are too small, even though the total free memory may be sufficient to satisfy a particular request for memory. To solve this, Apple engineers used the concept of a relocatable handle, a reference to memory which allowed the actual data referred to be moved without invalidating the handle. Apple's scheme was simple – a handle was simply a pointer into a (non-relocatable) table of further pointers, which in turn pointed to the data. If a memory request required compaction of memory, this was done and the table, called the master pointer block, was updated. The machine itself implemented two areas in memory available for this scheme – the system heap (used for the OS), and the application heap.
As long as only one application at a time was run, the system worked well. Since the entire application heap was dissolved when the application quit, fragmentation was minimized.

The memory management system had weaknesses; the system heap was not protected from errant applications, as would have been possible if the system architecture had supported memory protection, and this was frequently the cause of system problems and crashes.
In addition, the handle-based approach also opened up a source of programming errors, where pointers to data within such relocatable blocks could not be guaranteed to remain valid across calls that might cause memory to move. This was a real problem for almost every system API that existed. Because of the transparency of system-owned data structures at the time, the APIs could do little to solve this. Thus the onus was on the programmer not to create such pointers, or at least manage them very carefully by dereferencing all handles after every such API call. Since many programmers were not generally familiar with this approach, early Mac programs suffered frequently from faults arising from this.

Palm OS and 16-bit Windows use a similar scheme for memory management, but the Palm and Windows versions make programmer error more difficult. For instance, in Mac OS, to convert a handle to a pointer, a program just de-references the handle directly, but if the handle is not locked, the pointer can become invalid quickly. Calls to lock and unlock handles are not balanced; ten calls to are undone by a single call to . In Palm OS and Windows, handles are an opaque type and must be de-referenced with on Palm OS or on Windows. When a Palm or Windows application is finished with a handle, it calls or . Palm OS and Windows keep a lock count for blocks; after three calls to , a block will only become unlocked after three calls to .

Addressing the problem of nested locks and unlocks can be straightforward (although tedious) by employing various methods, but these intrude upon the readability of the associated code block and require awareness and discipline on the part of the coder.

Memory leaks and stale references

Awareness and discipline are also necessary to avoid memory "leaks" (failure to deallocate within the scope of the allocation) and to avoid references to stale handles after release (which usually resulted in a hard crash—annoying on a single-tasking system, potentially disastrous if other programs are running).

Switcher

The situation worsened with the advent of Switcher, which was a way for a Mac with 512 KB or more of memory to run multiple applications at once. This was a necessary step forward for users, who found the one-app-at-a-time approach very limiting. Because Apple was now committed to its memory management model, as well as compatibility with existing applications, it was forced to adopt a scheme where each application was allocated its own heap from the available RAM.
The amount of actual RAM allocated to each heap was set by a value coded into the metadata of each application, set by the programmer. Sometimes this value wasn't enough for particular kinds of work, so the value setting had to be exposed to the user to allow them to tweak the heap size to suit their own requirements. While popular among "power users", this exposure of a technical implementation detail was against the grain of the Mac user philosophy. Apart from exposing users to esoteric technicalities, it was inefficient, since an application would be made to grab all of its allotted RAM, even if it left most of it subsequently unused. Another application might be memory starved, but would be unable to utilize the free memory "owned" by another application.

While an application could not beneficially utilize a sister application's heap, it could certainly destroy it, typically by inadvertently writing to a nonsense address. An application accidentally treating a fragment of text or image, or an unassigned location as a pointer could easily overwrite the code or data of other applications or even the OS, leaving "lurkers" even after the program was exited. Such problems could be extremely difficult to analyze and correct.

Switcher evolved into MultiFinder in System 4.2, which became the Process Manager in System 7, and by then the scheme was long entrenched. Apple made some attempts to work around the obvious limitations – temporary memory was one, where an application could "borrow" free RAM that lay outside of its heap for short periods, but this was unpopular with programmers so it largely failed to solve the problems. Apple's System 7 Tune-up addon added a "minimum" memory size and a "preferred" size—if the preferred amount of memory was not available, the program could launch in the minimum space, possibly with reduced functionality. This was incorporated into the standard OS starting with System 7.1, but still did not address the root problem.

Virtual memory schemes, which made more memory available by paging unused portions of memory to disk, were made available by third-party utilities like Connectix Virtual, and then by Apple in System 7. This increased Macintosh memory capacity at a performance cost, but did not add protected memory or prevent the memory manager's heap compaction that would invalidate some pointers.

32-bit clean

Originally the Macintosh had 128 KB of RAM, with a true limit of 4 MB, despite being soldered. This limit would first be reached with the Macintosh Plus and its user upgradable memory. These first few Macintosh computers used the 68000 CPU, a 32-bit processor, but only had 24 physical address lines. The 24 lines allowed the processor to address up to 16 MB of memory (2²⁴ bytes), which was seen as a sufficient amount at the time. The RAM limit in the Macintosh design was 4 MB of RAM and 4 MB of ROM with the remaining 8 MB addresses split between the