Does Illustrator's Symbol Sprayer cache symbol instances or allocate new objects per spray event?

Understanding whether the Symbol Sprayer tool reuses cached symbol instances or creates a new object for each spray action is critical for predicting memory consumption in documents with large symbol sets. Current observations suggest incremental memory growth when spraying thousands of instances, yet official release notes do not describe a dedicated caching mechanism for this tool. The behavior appears version-sensitive and may differ between macOS and Windows due to underlying OS memory management, while Illustrator's internal garbage collector can temporarily mask allocation spikes during measurement.

Key questions

• Does the Symbol Sprayer maintain an internal instance cache that persists across spray operations, or does each spray event allocate a fresh symbol object?
• Is the observed memory growth attributable to a leak, expected object retention for undo history, or the absence of a pooling strategy?
• Are there documented version thresholds where the memory management behavior changed for this tool?