[squeak-dev] how/where is memory returned to the OS?

Fri Oct 19 15:46:45 UTC 2012

I have an image which needed to allocate 500MB of memory for a large
operation.  Now that operation is done and all objects have been
reclaimed.  According to VM I am now only using 200MB.

  (Smalltalk vmParameterAt: 2) max: (Smalltalk vmParameter at: 1)    "221923374"

However, when I look at my VM process in "top" or the System Monitor,
it still says its >500MB.

How does this work?