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sorenK · May 23, 2001, 12:10 PM

I have a G4 400 with 832 megs of ram installed, Mac OSX on one partition, and OS 9.1 that is a clean install on another partition. When I boot into OS 9.1, I discover that (Opening 'About this Computer' window) it is using 645 megs of ram. It really does use this much, I use graphics apps, and cannot use more that the 180mgs that is left over.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Quadzmodo · May 23, 2001, 01:58 PM

Originally posted by sorenK:
I have a G4 400 with 832 megs of ram installed, Mac OSX on one partition, and OS 9.1 that is a clean install on another partition. When I boot into OS 9.1, I discover that (Opening 'About this Computer' window) it is using 645 megs of ram. It really does use this much, I use graphics apps, and cannot use more that the 180mgs that is left over.
Anyone have any suggestions?

There's obviously a problem. I would suggest you cut your losses and reinstall the OS.

MacMonster · May 23, 2001, 03:12 PM

Had you enable the RAM Disk?

reader50 · May 23, 2001, 03:55 PM

Fire up the free utility Memory Mapper to see what part of the OS is taking up so much RAM. If it's the Finder, that is fairly easy to fix.

sorenK · May 23, 2001, 05:52 PM

Thanks for the tip about Memory Mapper. I discovered that the 'System Heap' is the RAM hog. I could understand this if I installed a lot of custom sounds or icons, but I have not done any modifications to my system other than copying over my old preference folder and some extensions. I ran MemMap also when I run classic in OSX and found that the System Heap is still a hog, but only using about 380mgs of ram. I will start pulling out my preference folder and such to see what the problem may be.

May 23, 2001, 07:18 PM

Do you have Virtual Memory on in the Memory Control Panel? If it is off, turn it on, restart, and see what happens. If that doesn't correct it try trashing your Finder Prefs and Memory Prefs.

bottles · May 23, 2001, 08:01 PM

Hi sorenK,

In your Memory control panel, try using the "Custom" setting (maybe 8000K to 10000K) instead of the Default setting for the Disk Cache. The Default setting is an "estimate" and could actually be incorrectly using too much memory. Also, keep in mind that, as MacMonster has suggested, any memory used by a RAM Disk (if you use one) is added to the System memory. Of course, any changes to the Memory control panel take effect after a restart.

bottles

sorenK · May 24, 2001, 10:27 AM

I never use virtual memory or ram disk, but did make sure they were off, and set the cache to default. Still no change. I went ahead and bit the bullet and backed everything up and did a clean install. The installer reported & fixed a disk error. I had never found any errors using the Mac disk first aid, nor did the disk check on startup after a crash report anything.

So far, everything is running as expected, although I haven't copied over my custom extensions and preferences. As I rebuild everything, I will see if the problem repeats itself. Until then, I am going to chalk up the problem to a mysterious disk error.

Thanks for the advice. Very cool people here.

yoyo52 · May 24, 2001, 11:00 AM

Just in case the problem repeats itself and it is a disk error of some sort that's responsible, you might think about using DiskWarrior to see if you can fix the error without having to reformat the whole drive. I know that reinstalling all your stuff takes a long while.

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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

Jsnuff1 · May 24, 2001, 02:47 PM

ahhhh no more of this in OSX

prolix · May 24, 2001, 05:07 PM

how many fonts do you have. i had a problem with macos eating insane amounts of ram and it was related to the 600+ fonts i had. if you do have a ton of fonts get adobe type manager and pull your fonts out of the system folder. then load them with atm. should help quite a bit.