br0ke

The article says "West Chester University of Pennsylvania"...

Grats on the job!

I hear you about the anxiety. I managed to land an interview with nvidia in 2001 and was so nervous that I couldn't eat or sleep for the 24 hours before the start of the interview (then ate lunch with them at their cafeteria and was wolfing food down like an animal). Didn't fare well, but a year later of hunting and working as a substitute teacher, I ended up working with a great team at FedEx for a while and went to being a "computer scientist" at the army research lab after that.

Anxiety is a challenge, but it can be overcome! I'm even in the process of starting with "toastmasters" to get me out of my comfort zone and learn how to be "on" around strangers.

Again, congratulations and thanks for sharing!

purge(8) flushes and clears the disk buffers, which is not the issue that kills me with my old macbook with 4G ram.

It looks like disk cache expiration is slow and tends to kick in when it's a bit too late. With the speed that modern apps chew through memory, I'm sent into a swap thrash and get sluggish response and beachballs.

MemoryKeeper on the App store seems to mostly clear the file cache and do some -fu to compact memory (maybe it's a memory defragment, the docs are a little lacking in technical details.) When I manually run it, everything runs great until the free memory dries up and I'm back in that alloc/swapthrash/cachepurge cycle again.

I wrote a tiny C program for linux to force cache expirations (in a very sloppy but reasonably portable way) back in '98 that I've started using again on osX, it fixes the issue and runs quite a bit quicker than MemoryKeeper. I can make it available if anyone else wants it.