Re: Obviously you are not a programmer :-P
Surely, the executable size is but a small fraction of overall memory usage in a modern OS?
This here is a reasonably typical Mac; few years old, 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 120G-ish of disk. Safari, for example, is a 1MB executable.
According to Activity Monitor, Safari is using 70MB of real, 281MB of virtual, 27MB of shared, 51MB of private, and 80MB of virtual private memory.
Now, I appreciate that MacOS will have a lot of frameworks and libraries and whatnot inhabiting memory, but I'd wot that the applications themselves use more memory than that. Determining what's actually going on in the memory of a computer running a modern operating system is becoming increasingly difficult ;-)
The cache thing, on the other hand, is an entirely different kettle of fish; I didn't think executables themselves ended up in cache.
