Gabe et. al.,
Here is an elegant little bit on why more memory for Mac OS X results
in better performance [excerpted from a nice 'Memory Usage' page
found at the following link: http://homepage.mac.com/simx/mughelp/
English/overview.html]:
--begin excerpt
...it should be noted that Mac OS X's memory management system is not
without it's downsides. The biggest change from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X
is that the system and it's applications use up a LOT more memory.
Mac OS X's system requirements state that it needs 128 MB of RAM, but
many people recommend a minimum of 512 MB for Mac OS X to run
acceptably. This amount is subjective, but one thing is for sure: the
more RAM that is made available to Mac OS X, the faster it runs.
Also, Mac OS X tends to eat up all available memory, even if there is
a lot of it available. This is because Mac OS X caches as much data
as it can in memory, so that it can potentially reuse that data
without having to re-cache it (the UNIX term for caching data in
memory is "paging in" memory). Mac OS X's performance drops when all
available memory is used, because it has to start removing things
from memory ("paging out"), which has a performance hit. This problem
is much more prevalent in Mac OS X because applications are not
limited to a specific amount of memory; they just take as much as
they need, so free memory dwindles fast.
--end excerpt
Joe
- OT: FYI: Memory Usage Mac OS X Kafka's Daytime
-
