Introduction
 The Window
 What's Happening?

 The Optimizer
 The Manager

 Table of Contents
 Questions

Introduction

The QuickBoost window allows you to boost your computer's memory yourself. MemoryBoost will try to reclaim memory itself over time, running mostly when you are away from your computer (or if memory becomes dangerously low). QuickBoost lets you preempt MemoryBoost, reclaiming memory whenever you want. And it lets you watch the reclamation process as it runs.

The Window

The QuickBoost window will either run a quick boost immediately, or will instruct you that you have enough free memory but you may try to boost anyway. In the latter case, you will see a "Boost anyway" button appear in the window. Clicking this will start the boost.

The statistics bars show you how much free memory your computer had when you first opened the QuickBoost window, and how much free memory your computer has at the present time. While the boost is running, you'll see your free memory drop, probably to zero, and then rebound back to its previous level (or further). This is by design; memory drops to zero when MemoryBoost is sweeping it for unused objects.

Finally, you can turn off the QuickBoost window by deselecting the "Show this window when QuickBoost runs" check box. If you deselect this box, the QuickBoost window will not appear when you run QuickBoost; it will run in the background, without prompting you. If you want to turn the QuickBoost window back on again, you can do so in the Options page in the Manager.

What's Happening?

The QuickBoost operation may be mysterious to you at first. Why does memory drop all of a sudden, and then bounce back? Why does QuickBoost sometimes regain a lot of memory, and sometimes not very much? These questions are at the heart of how MemoryBoost works. They are treated cursorily here; for more information, you may wish to begin in the Table of Contents.

When MemoryBoost sweeps your memory, it tries to push all the unused objects out of memory and onto the disk. To do this, it starts to collect all the free memory for itself. As time goes on, MemoryBoost exhausts all the free memory, and will start to reclaim memory from objects that no longer need it. This is how MemoryBoost reclaims old memory, and compacts the memory that is currently in use. When it is done collecting all the memory it possible can, it immediately returns all the free memory to your computer. That is why the free memory will jump quickly back to a reasonable level.