On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Barbara Hodge wrote:

> 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.

Probably a good move. I know that sounds "waffle-ly" but there are so many
factors that impact system performance that it's almost impossible without
a lot of detailed analysis to determine what will give the most for your
specific usage profile. But more memory won't hurt and almost certainly
will provide some benefit.

> 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?

The five days was because of the failed memory. I pulled the bad 1GB card
and replaced it with an old 512 MB card (that the 1GB had replaced).
Obviously, the system was booted after that. The replacement arrived five
days later and hence another reboot after installing it. I do not plan
reboots - only if needed due to hardware or more likely OS updates. Also,
the fact I was running a degraded system made me pay more attention to the
page fault rate.

Two others have responded to the question about should you leave it
running all the time so I'll just mostly agree. The nightly cleanup (and
actually some of the things only run weekly or monthly) are important (for
some meaning of important) but I doubt they're causing you serious issues.
However, there are some log files that if not cleaned up will grow to
infinity (but it should be years before they become large enough to be an
issue on most systems). So leave it on overnight so the operating system
can do it's thing. I'm also in the camp that believes there is no need to
regularly "stress test" components by regularly turning them on and off
(if things are going to fail, they're most likely to do so at power on or
off - not withstanding my recent memory failure that happened out of the
blue on a running system).

While you may never use the capabilities, OS X, as a Unix variant, is
fully capable of being a fairly busy server (don't let the fact that Apple
separately markets OS X Server confuse you - the main difference is server
management tools and some pre-installed server applications included with
OS X Server. I have plain old OS X "client" and yet I run a web server, a
mail server, a mailing list server, and a name server. That along with
scheduled network backups overnight probably makes my system busier
overnight than during the day!). With the Unix underpinnings, it really is
best to let the system run 24/7 since that is what Unix expects with the
scheduling of the system tasks the others mentioned.

-- Larry Stone
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