I was really excited when a copy of sphere was given to me because I love easy find and have always wished for a real alternative to spotlight. I tried it yesterday and it’s incredibly powerful but today I have serious concerns. 681meg of RAM with no use of the app except turning it on? Guess I’ll have to wait for a few upgrades.
Thanks for the feedback! The primary functionality (See Also) of DEVONsphere Express requires a lot of RAM. But how many files does the index contain (see Preferences > Categories)?
Hi Christian…
I guess I don’t understand. As my itunes grew over the last ten years to over 50,000 items, my ram usage during my use of itunes never went up. The same goes for spotlight except when it’s indexing which is temporary. Plus easyfind (invaluable app!) never seems to leave a big ram footprint…ever. Plus…I couldn’t understand why ram in sphere grew from 600 to over 800 without my having run even 1 search.
Thanks for the response!
The index for See Also is quite complex and therefore requires more memory. EasyFind doesn’t use an index, iTunes is just a simple database and doesn’t contain much metadata (just a bunch of titles, albums, composers/authors etc.).
And even all Spotlight processes (you have to display all processes in the Activity Monitor, not only your own ones) use 150-300 MB over here despite a much smaller index compared to e.g. your DEVONsphere Express index.
The upcoming version 1.4 will fix few minor leaks but that will probably not make a major difference.
… I´m going to join this thread… I have the same problems. The memory usage is absolutely “out of scope” (see attachment). Working with Photoshop or Lightroom when have on DEVONsphere running: difficult. So I´m also waiting for an update and significant decrease of memory usage.
Don’t expect DEVONsphere Express to become a small memory footprint app, as Christian noted. It is dynamically managing the text content indexes of all the items you have designated for indexing. The only way to reduce the memory requirements would be to reduce the scope of items to be indexed.
I don’t have DEVONsphere Express running all the time. But there are times when I find it extremely useful and launch it from the Applications folder. When finished, I quit it and reclaim memory. That helps, on my MacBook Air, which is limited to 4 GB RAM. One of these days I’ll go for a laptop with lots more RAM. 