[Ti] sleep mode - Battery life

[David Remahl]

On fredag, jun 6, 2003, at 23:34 Europe/Stockholm, Michael Bigley wrote:

>> http://www.macdailynews.com/opinion_comments.php?id=P1191_0_2_0
>>  I (and above-linked writer) concur about never shutting down. This 
>> article
>> recommends leaving all apps open as well - cuz of how OS X handles 
>> memory
>> that is possibly fine? Would be interested in others' views.
>
> Without reading the article, I can say from my experience that leaving 
> apps open, while true in theory, is not always true in practice. My 
> guess is that some carbonized apps don't use memory properly. The most 
> obvious, again in my experience, are Adobe apps, specifically 
> Photoshop and worse, Illustrator. Illustrator will often crash when 
> either bringing it from background or sending it to background 
> (although I have found that if I just click the icon in the dock and 
> let the spinning rainbow do its thing for half-a-minute or so it may 
> revive itself); it will crash 99% of the time when waking from sleep.
>
> Photoshop crashes about 30% of the time when waking from sleep, but 
> that number goes up if Illustrator is open too.  I hope that Adobe is 
> working on Cocoa versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, because memory 
> management should be much better. Photoshop also doesn't give back 
> memory as it should, so leaving it open for a long time tends to 
> increase pageouts to virtual memory for other things.
>
> The nice thing about OSX, however, is that quitting Photoshop will 
> cause the OS to "heal" it's memory situation rather quickly.
>
> OTOH, apps like Eudora, Watson, Camino, iCal, TextEdit, BBedit, 
> Entourage, do stay up on my Ti almost non-stop.

Yes, leaving applications always on is good in theory:

1.) Resources that the application needs will be cached in memory.
2.) The dispatch tables for Objective-C messaging will "warm up" and 
prevent expensive lookups.

Unfortunately, many Mac OS X GUI applications still have memory leaks 
and therefore will use more than they should if left running for a long 
time. Note that a httpd process (apache) will only serve so many 
requests before it restarts itself - to avoid a small memory leak 
turning into a big problem over time.

Memory management isn't really a Carbon vs Cocoa argument. There are 
many leaky programs in both camps. The point is, if the computer gets 
sluggish after running for a while, try restarting some applications 
that have been running for a long time. If the computer doesn't feel 
sluggish, leave them on and enjoy the benefits that come with increased 
performance.

/ David