[bobpensik]

Hey All,

Well i have had my rev a PB for about 3 months now and it has been great, i installed panther and it was awesome, but lately i have been noticing that everything seems to be running slowly, like i will hit refresh in Safari and it won't do anything for like 2 seconds, then it will refresh! i mean i have hever had that problem before!

As you can see i have 640Mb RAM, so i don't think that is the problem, but i have noticed that my fan has been turning on when i am surfing the net and only have like Safari, iTunes and Fire open! i mean those things can't be stressing the computer that much can they??

I have run Repair Permission, and use Mac Janitor often, i also never turn off my computer, but i don't think that is the problem! also i wanted to check the process viewer and when i opened it i found that Safari was using 125MB of system memory!! obvisouly i closed it and re-opened it, and now it is down to only 40MB, but isn't that a bit much too! i mean Finder is using like 40MB too!

Also i notice when i open up activity monitor that it shows huge amounts of inactive system memory! what is the reason for that?? Here is what it looks like, in System Memory tab of Activity Monitor, when i have Safari, iTunes and Fire running, nothing else...

Wired: 63MB
Active: 215MB
Inactive:240MB
Used: 516MB
Free: 124MB
Vm Size: 2.57GB
Page Ins/Outs: 41101/1565

I am not sure what all this means really, but it seems odd that i have so much inactive and not much at all free with barely anything running!!

Is there anything i can do to help my system not seem sluggish anymore?? i mean this is like a brand new machine, and i would understand if i were doign photoshop work or on dreamweaver, but all i am doing is surfing the net and listening to music!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks! :-)

[melman101]

Do you have iChat open? check your activity monitor and see which app is taking up a crap load of CPU Processes. My iChat sometimes goes as high as 90%. When I close that, it makes the computer run faster.

Dont know why iChat does that?

[uv23]

I'm just a recent switcher so this advice may be invalid. But Safari is pretty buggy. If it has memory leaks, and you haven't restarted your PB in a long time, it could be eating up more and more memory and thus bogging things down. Try restarting your PB and see if it improves.

[bobpensik]

no i don't use iChat so that woudln't be the problem, and i usually restart every couple days, just to make thigns run more smoothly, but Safari is my internet browser, and i won't go back to IE, so you think it is just safari?? that seems odd as i haven't had the problem in the last 3 months!

[uv23]

No idea, but 125mb seems extreme. Even with several rich content safari windows open it only uses about 20-27mb of ram on my 12" PB Rev B (although I just noticed that Mail was using 70mb!! Yikes...)

[hamiltondj]

Do you use or have ical installed?

I have noticed something called the ical helper that just zaps
system resources every now and then. The best way to fix (that I know) is to move your ical calendars out of the library folder
and into your home directory.

[bobpensik]

i think that i prolly have iCal installed but i don't use it, but i find that Safari continually takes more and more system memory, like when i will start it out, i will have 5 tabs open, and it will take about 40MB, then keeping those same 5 tabs open over the course of a day it will go up significantly! i mean right now it is at 80MB with only 3 tabs running, and it keeps getting bigger! i mean what is with that??

And does anyone know why i have so much inactive system memry! i mean if it is inactive shoudln't it be free??? as inactive implies it isn't being used???

[effgee]

Bobpensik,

Panther is pretty good at allocating RAM, I don't think your problem lies in that area. As long as you have approx. 20% free memory, you're well in the "green zone".

For example, Safari on my machine (1 window, 7 tabs) is using 56MB RAM at the moment. No sign of slow-down.

I'd recommend checking out the load on your CPU in Activity Monitor ("Applications" > "Utilities" > "Activity Monitor", click in the CPU tab and then click in the CPU column header) and check if there's a process hogging your CPU cycles.

I used to have a bad/corrupt copy of an Epson printer driver (some faceless background app) that would hog about 80% of my dual G4's CPU immediately after starting the machine. Only way to fix it was to kill the process and subsequently reinstall the driver.

HTH,

eff

[bobpensik]

effgee, thanks for the tip, i checked and nothing was really hogging resources, the main CPU useage was iTunes but that was only like 7%, but i decided to run a program called PantherCacheCleaner, and that seems to have made things faster again, plus i ran Repair Disk, and things seem back to normal again! thanks for the help everyone! :-)

[mini-pbook]

Bobpensik,

I have a 17" rev. b powerbook, but used to have a 12". With my 17", I have pretty much the same memory issues that you do. I have 512 mb ram, and right now Safari is using 80mb. I only have 3 tabs open, and have been using Safari for under an hour. Nothing really seems slow on my machine however, but Safari definitely takes up a lot of memory on my machine. I almost always have Mail and iCal open, not sure if that's part of the reason or not.

I just saw your last post, I think I will try using those programs on my computer too.