My game uses a lot of images, for the over-world, battle screens, chats, etc. I'm really meticulous when it comes to memory management, and I've noticed that even though I dispose every image when I load in a new one, the memory never goes down.
Isn't this what Dispose() should do or is my understanding wrong?
Disposal patterns like LibGDX's in languages with GCs often have to do with releasing un-managed resources in addition to (or instead of) managed memory. This true with C#'s IDisposable interface, and based on the documentation LibGDX's pattern serves a similar purpose.
This means that simply looking at private working-set CPU-side RAM use may not be an accurate way to tell if disposing of the resource is "working as intended" or not. For example, if a texture isn't caching its image data on the CPU (expecting it to be on the GPU), then disposing it will not impact CPU-side memory appreciably at all.
LibGDX's source code is on GitHub, so you can take a look at the specific implementations of the dispose method. For example, texture's or pixmap's.
