On Jan 20, 2005, at 12:46 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
(lots of computer talk snipped)
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?
The only people I know of reporting this bug are Mac users.
Hi Christopher,
Thank you for this info...:-)
My hunch is that this is a mac issue...there may be similar issues in Windows as David mentioned but I think this particular issue may be mac specific.
How much RAM and hard disk space do people have on the machines where this is occurring?
I have 768 megs of Ram, and a large number of gigs of hard drive space.
How many other apps are running at the time this happens?
There's a kicker. I usually have a bunch of stuff open at the same time, like AppleWorks, Mail, Safari, TextEdit, Preview, and maybe Word or Excel.
You have 128M more RAM on your machine than I do on the machine I am testing this on. When I open all of the applications you mentioned and then open Finale and a few files, the free memory drops way down and my machine starts paging (moving data from the physical memory to disk.) Since you have and extra 128M you have a little more elbow room but that can get eaten up pretty quickly by opening files within those applications. On my machine, I got to the paging stage with no other files open (pictures, PDF's etc.) in the other applications....just files open in Finale. Add PDF's pics etc in and I'll bet you are getting low on free memory. Additionally, if there is a memory leak anywhere (up until 10.3.5 at least, Safari was rumored to have this problem) then your free RAM would be drifting down further over time until there is a restart.
I typically only quit one of the first five apps or Finale when it acts up (rare these days in OS X) or if I have to reboot. My computer is often on for weeks at a time without being turned off or rebooted.
So, at some point, over time, the system starts thrashing, or as you said, Finale acts up, which may be a clue that paging is occurring. Info is now being written from RAM to disk, and we don't know which information is being written to disk. If it happens to temp files or the pointer tables as David mentioned (I still don't quite understand how Finale's temp files are working exactly) then there is a problem. Also, if one sees a temp file "hanging"....(I've seen this before) then perhaps that is another clue. Accessing files from disk is slower than accessing them from RAM. Which goes back to what Darcy was talking about.
So I guess the fix can be many things. The easiest thing is to have fewer apps open while working in Finale especially when working on multiple large files at the same time. But there is also adding more RAM (it is getting so that a gig of RAM is the minimum I want to have on my machine...my other machine has 2 Gigs and I need to buy more for the one I'm working on now), restarting more often and making sure cron scripts are being run (daily, weekly, and monthly.) If your computer is being put to sleep overnight or is shut down much of the time, these may not be running. I use Cocktail for this but there is also MacJanitor which is free and can do the job. The terminal can also be used for this. Type "sudo periodic daily weekly monthly" (no quotes) and hit return. Type your admin password and the scripts will run. Doing this once a week may help.
Finale uses a lot of memory I have noticed. It uses a lot of shared memory too which leads me to believe that the new graphics are using up a lot of memory. I personally would trade the nice graphics for having the program use less memory. And there's got to be a better way to handle the temp file thing.
-K
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