Memory Pressure

Noun · Development

Definitions

  1. A condition in which available physical memory is nearly exhausted, forcing the OS to aggressively page, compress, or kill processes to reclaim RAM. Applications can respond to memory pressure notifications by releasing caches and non-essential buffers.

    In plain English: When a device is running low on available memory and the operating system starts taking aggressive action to free some up.

    Example: "Under memory pressure, iOS sends `didReceiveMemoryWarning` — if you don't drop your image cache, the OS will terminate your app."

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