Wonderfully useful and informative, thanks. I am going to add 1GB RAM as these discussions remind me that overall I have found speed unsatisfactory in different apps and an improvement would be great.
One slightly linked question if I may: you mention four-five days. I have been told that the OSX is built to leave running for days - but still tend to switch off at night. Am I unnecessarily doing so? Barbara > From: Larry Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Reply-To: "Entourage:mac Talk" <[email protected]> > Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:12:27 -0600 (CST) > To: "Entourage:mac Talk" <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: Not enough memory messages > > On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Barbara Hodge wrote: > >> I have in System memory: >> >> Free 9 MB (scarily low???) > > No, quite normal actually. As I mentioned earlier, OS X is a virtual > memory operating system. I don't want to go into a highly technical > discussion of what a virtual memory system is except to say that it is > normal to have very little free memory. The important question to whether > you have enough physical memory is how much page faulting is going on and > that's partually answered by: > >> Page ins/outs 68262/13569 > > But without knowing how long the system has been up, those numbers are > meaningless. Comparing to my system, if you've been up for a few days, I'd > call those numbers low. I hit over one million "page ins" in five days > last week while temporarily running my G4 iMac with only 786 MB (awaiting > warranty replacement of a 1GB memory card). However, during that period, > I'd call performance unsatisfactory. > >> I have 7 apps open: Quark, e'rage, safari, dreamweaver, adobe photoshop, >> adobe acrobat, excel. > > Having them open is not necessarily going to cause you memory performance > issues if six of them are idle. However, many programs are doing stuff in > the background (animatations in web pages, Entourage checking for new > mail, etc.). Memory performance issues develop when the active processes > collectively need more memory than is available and the operating system > has to keep switching that memory around between those processes. The > memory used by inactive processes gets "swapped out" to disk where it's no > longer competing for the physical memory. The reason I said above that low > free memory is normal is because the operating system does not free up > more memory by swapping than is actually needed. Only by quitting a > program does large chunks of memory get freed. > > > -- Larry Stone > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- > 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/> -- 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/>
