On Apr 28, 1:26 pm, Bruce Johnson <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Apr 28, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Paul wrote:
>
>
>
> > You could search for used RAM or salvage memory out of old G4's you
> > may find cheap on places like Craigslist, though 512's are harder to
> > find than the smaller ones.
>
> > But also look into what a VM size of 44 GB means. It sounds high, but
> > what's considered normal?
right now on my 550g4 the VM size in Activity Monitor says 3GB but
there is only 1 64MB swap file in /var/vm (which you must have
unhidden files to see) !!!
That AM VM thing is funny the file size is the important thing.
i know this machine is low RAM with only 576, the vm files and when
they get up over 256MB there is a lot of slowing down and I restart
and/or move my project to the newer g4.
[Note this very very different from linux or classic unix handles vm,
its hard to compare though since most apps use about 1/2 the ram or
less]
also when I am running jobs I run the Activity Monitor with the memory
usage showing in the dock and when the green which is free gets below
I guess about 1/8 of the pie that's when swapping starts to get big.
on another machine with a gigabyte ram doing the same thing I see the
green staying around 1/4 and also getting bigger later on after the
jobs are done which the first lower ram one doesn't do.
also I/O is a factor, that is the hard drive quality in actual
throughput (not rated speed of the bus !).
thirdly apples system monitor does not show in cpu usage, the altivec
utilization
(which is much more RAM intensive of course having 4 hardware
channels).
I am sure the extra ram will help but will it be enough, or do you
need to find a way to reduce your needs if no way to get newer
hardware ?? Your 44GB figure sounds very very high, but it may be
meaning little; but if the swap files are *approaching* the real RAM
limits you are in trouble, that is what you should be looking at.
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