[GoldenHammer]

I recently got my first Mac a PB G4 with 1 GB RAM and running on OSX 10.2.3. It is a nice machine and operating environment. I am learning its optimization in both the usage of memory management and performance.

Though OSX is smart enough to handle things automatically in these aspects, I find the RAM usage reported by iPulse is always at 26% of total physica memory even loaded with big image files and many active applications.

I would hope to see if there is a way to manually assign more free RAM to a particular application such as Photoshop 7 and maybe also the caching of disk to enhance the I/O performance.

Is there any good reference for OSX optimization? Thanks.

[silverghost]

in photoshop 7 look in the preference, it has a setting for the amount of ram you want to give it. in i think carbon apps you can get info on the app and change the memory settings there(apple+i). thats about all i can tell you, but OSX has great memory management besides photoshop 7(ive set it to use about 600 megs) what did you specificly want to do?

personaly i like that i have ram not used till my other apps need them. what i mean is why would you go to a buffet when all you wanted was a sandwich(sorry thats the best analogy i could think of at the time).

by the way ive got photoshop, flash,dreamweaver,mail,2 terminal windows,ical,ichat,and safari open all the time. in photoshop i work on 400+meg files, in flash im always writting actionscript, and in dreamweaver ive always got several site files open.

TiSD w/1gig ram


aloha

[bradoesch]

Originally posted by silverghost:
i think carbon apps you can get info on the app and change the memory settings there(apple+i)

You can manually change memory settings for classic applications but not carbon apps.

[wynn]

i'm glad you brought up this topic. i was just about to post about optimization as well. i did a search and found a lot of people doing the follwing three things (most of the info was from macosxhints.com):

- macjanitor - mainly useful for laptop owners who shut down their machines. if i understand it correctly, unix-based os's are made to run constantly and perform nightly maintenance tasks. by shutting down at night, the os is unable to perform the maintenance. the os creates a log file that can grow quite large over time. macjanitor will purge these log files

- optimizeX

- fscky (sp?) at startup

are these three tasks still applicable to os 10.2.3?

[K++]

Originally posted by wynn:

- fscky (sp?) at startup

First off that's fsck -y

Secondly fsck stands for File System Consistency Check so as you can see it has nothing to do with the performance or optmization of your system. Same goes for the other apps. Though it can be argued that space use can detract from performance, that only really applies to disk fragmentation which none of the above apps do a damn thing about.

Lastly the VM is X is gonna do alot better than you can so there really is no way to optimize its memory usage any more that it already is. As for general performance, besides routine de-frags I can't see anything that you can do to make your machine run any better than it currently is.

[Jerommeke]

About the memory management, I don't know how much RAM you have, but surely in the start it occupies not all the RAM. OS X memory management is incredible. I have MenuMeters since a week or so and I can now constantly look how it behaves

Anyway, no way to worry, if a program would like to have more RAM, it will get it, and OS X is most likely to give it automatically (when available)

[silverghost]

Originally posted by bradoesch:
You can manually change memory settings for classic applications but not carbon apps.

sorry but i think you might be wrong on this one, cocoa apps cant be change like carbon apps can. Carbon apps are classic apps with about 10 - 30% more code added to work in OSX; Cocoa apps are written from scratch for OSX.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0010/17.cocoa.shtml


aloha

[Art Vandelay]

Originally posted by silverghost:
sorry but i think you might be wrong on this one, cocoa apps cant be change like carbon apps can. Carbon apps are classic apps with about 10 - 30% more code added to work in OSX; Cocoa apps are written from scratch for OSX.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0010/17.cocoa.shtml


aloha

The memory settings for Carbon apps only apply when they are run within Classic. The settings have no effect when the app is run natively in OS X.

[silverghost]

Originally posted by Art Vandelay:
The memory settings for Carbon apps only apply when they are run within Classic. The settings have no effect when the app is run natively in OS X.

yes, i forgot about that; but in OSX for Carbon apps you can still change the prefered memory settings even though it wont take effect like you said till in they run in classic mode.

not to sure about this one but is photoshop a complete rewrite in cocoa? within photoshop they allow you to change the memory in the preferences thus your memory settings can be used in OSX, if its not a complete rewrite then i wish more Carbon apps could gain this type of ability while the developers (hopefully) rewrite in Cocoa to take advantage of OSX's nifty memory management.

sorry if i might have caused the thread to go slightly of topic.


aloha

[cpac]

Originally posted by silverghost:
not to sure about this one but is photoshop a complete rewrite in cocoa?

no.

[CheesePuff]

There is a problem with OS X 10.2 (didn't do this in OS X 10.1 apparently). If you just open a folder of with lots of files in it (more than 50) and scroll through them, it eats up about 25 MB of RAM and caches it until you restart.

But, you can simply enter in this command into Terminal and it will free up all RAM:

sudo periodic weekly

I usually do this when I'm down to 50 MB of free RAM, and it brings me up to 350 MB within a minute.