I was inspecting my crash log and noticed several apps appear to have been jettisoned. But looking at the multitasking bar, they are still there. Is there another way I can confirm that inactive apps are actually being jettisoned before my app crashes? Can this be seen in any of the tools?
Up until now, I assumed my app was being closed without the inactive apps being jettisoned. Now I’m unsure.
Update
I have, on several occasions, had my crashing app stop crashing after I removed everything from the multitasking bar. I didn’t check the crash log in those cases, and I’ll have to do that in the future. But it’s hard to imagine that that was just a coincidence.
I used instruments to see what the memory usage was while my app was running. I can see that real memory in the Memory Monitor reports the amount of real memory being used by each app.
Seeing that several inactive apps were showing memory use, I confirmed that they were in the multitasking bar. I was able to manually delete each one from the bar and saw an immediate response in memory usage. Each deleted app disappeared from the memory usage list.
This answers my question — Instruments can show how much memory is used by apps that show up in the multitasking bar.
Apparently, the multitasking bar is showing applications that are currently taking real memory. It is not just a launch history.
That being said, I don’t understand why Jetsam does not release these apps before killing my running app. I’ll post that question later as a new one.