[macdevguy]

What should be a typical real memory usage of a software on Mac?
Is there any recommended maximum limit?
For example a software should not use more then a certain % of the total real memory at all times?

Thanks!

[Chuckit]

There's not really any such guideline. As a rule of thumb, you probably don't want to be a lot heavier than software users view as similar to yours — but even that isn't really true all the time (nobody blames Photoshop for taking up many times more memory than GraphicConverter).

[Thinine]

Yeah, it really varies by case. Testing is really the only way to reveal what the memory limits should be for your app. Generally, you should have different cache limits based on the amount of system memory. This is what WebKit does. Systems with less tha 512MB of memory keep less information in active cache than systems with more.

But like I said, it's really an app by app thing.