Wuala is eating my memory!?

That's a fundamental problem with Java's memory model. If you want this to be fixed, you can go to
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_...
register and vote for this bug. However, don't expect too much. Some bugs on bugs.sun.com are ten years old and still not fixed. :)

Here are the technical details:
Java applications (like Wuala) never return memory to the operating system. So if Wuala just uses 200 MB once for a second to scale a large image, memory consumption as shown in the task manager will stay at that level. So Wuala might use just 30MB after that operation but Java keeps the 200MB allocated. Sun argues that this doesn't hurt because the operating system will page out the unused 170MB to the hard disk if more memory is needed, thus freeing up the physical memory for other applications. So the 200MB consumption displayed in the Windows Task Manager makes Wuala's memory consumption look much worse than it actually is. :(

I will add a memory meter to the about box with the next update, so it will be possible to see how much memory Wuala is 'actually' using.

(Btw: sometimes memory consumption might go down a little, that's because of memory allocated and freed up by native code that isn't using Java memory.)

Help->About Wuala. There Wuala displays how much memory Wuala uses. 16 TB can't be true ;)

As Deathbob says, we're not currently considering moving to another implementation language. The explanation with the swap space is technically sound, you should not worry about memory allocation that much and rather worry about usage (which can be seen in the about box).

The memory allocation you report happens after a few days of continued usage, is that correct? Are you running Wuala on a server machine? Or is it straight after launch?

kaspar