> I looked it up and my system has 256MB RAM. since I upgraded from a 180 > MHy machine with 96 MB RAM RAM doubled to 192MB RAM i considered 256MB > to be ample. I do not have any out of memory notifications so that was > not a problem I considered.
OS X doesn't have "out of memory notifications"...it just runs progressively slower and slower and slower until it appears to stop running because the simplest action literally takes minutes to complete. Officially, OS X may run in 256 megabytes, but I personally find that it runs best with at least 768 megabytes. I don't even try to run on anything less than 512 megabytes (and I only go as low as that on one machine because the extra RAM for it hasn't arrived yet). If you're seeing interesting performance problems, try the command line/terminal command 'top'. Look for a line similar to: > PhysMem: 46.1M wired, 211M active, 168M inactive, 424M used, 87.8M free If your "free" number is small (a nebulous term, I know), you're likely to see performance issues as the virtual memory system swaps to disk. These issues will be heightened if you have a mostly full disk...especially if it hasn't been defragmented in recent memory. Swapping is reflected in the line from 'top' akin to: > VM: 1.59G + 50.3M 19073(0) pageins, 10419(0) pageouts If pageins and pageouts are relatively high, you're spending most of your machine's time swapping memory from the drive to real memory. At 256 megabytes, you'll spend a lot of time swapping... especially if you use Classic at all! [Classic allocates an entire gigabyte of virtual memory...] As has been the case on the Macintosh for nearly 20 years, more memory still solves lots of problems. mikel -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
