On 5/20/09, Kris Tilford wrote: >I still think RAM Doubler isn't required in OS 9.x. on a PPC Mac.
Im my experience (with a PB1400), I would tend to agree. I seem to recall that Apple started to make some improvements in its VM along about Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6, and that there were some minor issues with the Apple VM at that time. I found RamDoubler more stable at that time. >Further, most PPC Mac have ability to install large amounts of RAM, so >you're not as constricted as you were on 68K Macs. Better to buy real >RAM then use virtual RAM. In OS 9.x you handle this with Control >Panels>Memory>Virtual Memory. You can double or triple your RAM if you >want. I always had large amounts of real RAM and turned virtual memory >off, then things were really quick. On a PB1400, with a maximum of 64MB of 'real' RAM, running a virtual memory manager was usually a necessity for me, although I usually worked in such a way to avoid using all of my 'real' RAM to avoid performance hits from disk swaps. I would say, moreover, that having memory paged to disk was more 'graceful' than running out of RAM... Running Apple's VM also required less 'real' RAM being allocated for applications, as the VM system would load some code required by a properly written application as needed, instead of loading everything into RAM upon launch. I'm not sure RamDoubler ever implemented that wrinkle. Again on my PB1400, which came with a 750MB hard drive, RamDoubler had the great virtue of not creating a VM swap file, which was the case in Apple's VM system. To 'double' RAM under Apple's system with my PB1400 required a 128MB VM swap file, which was 17% of the hard drive! Add the large amount of hard disk space taken up by Mac OS 9, and hard disk space became very tight. When using RamDoubler, I was always careful to have enough free space for it to use for disk paging, but RamDoubler's memory management scheme made it rare to need much in the way of swap space. Of course, I did upgrade to a much larger hard drive, which cancelled out the swap file size concern. I keep my PB1400 set up with 2 boot partitions - one with System 7.6.1 and RamDoubler (for speed) and one with Mac OS 9.1 with Apple's VM (for compatibility with more recent applications). All that having been said, I don't think there would be much point in running either scheme under Mac OS 9 on my Pismo with 768MB of RAM, or my Cube with 1.5 GB of RAM. As Kris said - just turn virtual memory off, and enjoy the speed! - Don -- Don Zahniser Powerbook G3 (Pismo), 40GB HD (5200 RPM), 768 MB RAM, Mac OS 10.4.11 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Low End Mac's G-Books list, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
