[X4U] Tuning Tiger

[John Baltutis]

On 05/03/05, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
>
>> Well then, I guess the answer would depend on the applications that
>> you use, the size of the files that you edit, or the sizes of the
>> databases that you want to load, and the thickness of your wallet.
>
> Please pardon my frustration, maybe I'm being dense here, but what I'm
> trying to do is get a realistic idea of how much the applications think I'm
> using.  Do I simply bog the system down as much as I expect it to be
> normally, do a "du -sk /var/vm", and then go out and buy that much Physical
> RAM, or should I be doing something else.
>
> On any normal Unix varient it's fairly easy to determine just how much
> virtual memory you're using at any given time.  Shoot, even on Windows or
> OpenVMS it's easy to get a pretty good idea.  Somehow I don't like Mac OS X
> indicating I'm using ~8GB VM, when I'm only using ~2GB worth of swap files.
> Someone said that this is because the 8GB is the max it has the potential to
> use, and this seems a little odd to me, but I hope it's right, as the more
> likely answer seems to me to be that Apple is compressing the swap file (and
> thereby degrading performance).
>
> Does anyone actually do any performance tuning on the Mac?  Or is the
> solution to everything to get a faster system or more RAM?
>
> Personally I've never seen a system as RAM hungry as Mac OS X gives the
> impression of being, and this has been a source of irritation to me ever
> since I moved off of Mac OS 9 a couple years ago.

Go to <http://developer.apple.com/>, type in virtual memory in the search
box, and read all about it. Data point: G4, 450 MP, 1.5 GB RAM, and 17 GB
disk space free on the boot volume is currently using 855 MB RAM, 680 MB
RAM is free, and VM is 3.3 GB with one 68 MB swapfile.