You should be able to figure out how much RAM Finale is using by using your OS's version of TOP (on Windows you can use the Task Manager for that). You should check RAM using before loading Finale, RAM usage after loading Finale with no files, then check RAM usage as you open more and more files, then close all files and check RAM usage.
I have been running top..through the terminal application. After opening several files, the RAM usage increased by around 35-40% which I thought was significant. But that isn't the whole picture IMHO.
One also has to look at how the system is running...especially how much free RAM is available. And numbers can be deceptive here...it can look like the memory handling system in OS X is taking care of everything correctly while at the same time things will get sluggish and not work quite right...
When I opened Finale there was quite a drop in free RAM and after opening several files, the free RAM got low enough to cause paging. (I intentionally have several apps open as I am doing this because I do have a good amount of RAM in my machine and I need to push it in order to see what is happening if I open Finale with a system that is already stressed....in otherwords...to cause my machine to behave as a machine with less RAM would behave)
These drops in free RAM in OS X have also been reported due to memory leaks coming from somewhere...I've heard of it happening with apps that have code issues and sometimes with printer drivers. I haven't seen any memory leaks with Finale up to this point however. But I haven't really tested it.
I very strongly doubt that this has anything to do with system resources and has everything to do with the very odd Finale temp file architecture that mixes content from multiple files within a single temp file.
I agree with you that there is a problem with the temp file architecture in Finale...and BTW thank you for answering a question I had about that...I was wondering what was different about Finale temp files...:-)
The only thing required to then produce the bug (i.e., content from the wrong file) is for the pointer table that maps open files to temp files to get messed up.
I agree...but this is the part that I'm wondering about....and this is the part that I think may be RAM related...when free RAM is low in OS X, all sorts of things can go haywire (I used the example of Preferences not being saved correctly under these circumstances...) I'm wondering if this can in some way cause the mess up you are talking about...
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This may explain why Finale is faster after a restart and why it seems that temp files are becoming bloated/corrupted after a long Finale session. It may not be the files themselves but rather that more paging has occured over a long session as OS X tries to juggle memory resources.
It's probably not paging.
It actually is paging....I can see it happening through the top command in Terminal. I pushed my system until I had 108M of free RAM. After opening Finale that number dropped to 65M and then when I opened several documents it dropped to 7M. It was when free RAM got low that the system started paging. Again, I have to push my system by opening several other apps to get it to do this, but a system with less RAM would reach this point without a bunch of other apps open. Or in the case that there was a memory leak somewhere. Or even after a long "computer session" under some circumstances.
......but the amount of churning people are describing with temp files leads me to believe that somewhere in the temp file handling, there's some process that is subject to this kind of churn effect.
You may be right..but, in addition, there is also something in Mac Land called "Thrashing" that causes these same symptoms and is due to a machine needing more RAM and/or more hard disk space. I'm thinking it could be a combination of things going on.
And the fact that Darcy mentioned this:
I noticed a *drastic* performance improvement when I quit and restart Finale compared to what I was getting during the session where the File Overwrite bug hit, despite having exactly the same set of files open as I did before. Redraws were easily twice as fast.
makes me thing that it is at least partially systemic...I don't think that the Temp files were doing anything differently after the restart. But if it was a resource problem, a restart would help.
So the questions I am still curious about are:
Is this a Mac specific issue? If not can the problem be replicated on a windows machine and under what circumstances?
Are Temp files handled the same or differently in MacFinale and WinFinale?
How much RAM and hard disk space do people have on the machines where this is occurring?
How many other apps are running at the time this happens?
What do the system resource numbers look like after the Overwrite Bug strikes?
-K
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