[G4] Slow Preformance

[Joseph B. Gurman]

     David Whipple wrote:

>My G4 933 w/ max ram of 1.25 gigs is slowing down a lot. I running 
>OS 10.2.8 and I do a lot of DV editing in iMovie 3.0.3 and that is 
>very slow. I am down to about 7 gigs of disk space(out of 60). I 
>really don't want to take off my working file at this time. I was 
>thinking of getting a 200 gig drive. Would that take care  of the 
>problem or is iMovie 3.0.3 just not optimized for the G4 or is OS 
>10.2.8 not
>optimized for the G4? Are they more geared towards the G5s? Anyway I 
>would like to know way would be the best type of drive to get for 
>the 933.

     I don't really know how virtual memory allocation works on OS X. 
You can, however, take a look (in the Terminal, for instance, using 
"top" --- check the fifth line of the display, where it says "VM" and 
see [1] how much VM the system is using _while you're editing_ and 
[2] the rate at which the number of pageouts is increasing) . In any 
case. my son's old iBook with a 15 Gbyte drive started grinding to a 
halt (and munging permissions regularly) when it got down to ~ 3.5 
Gbyte of free space. I ended up getting him an external drive for his 
iTunes Music folder. Things work a lot better now.

     My suspicion is that iMovie, like image editing apps, uses a ton 
of VM, and you just don't have enough. Disk drives are so cheap that 
it's worth getting a large drive just for the peace of mind: no file 
system trashing when disk space is low, no VM space problems. I've 
had no problem running iMovie 2 and 3 on a variety of G4's, including 
500 AGP's, dual 500 Gbit Ethernets,  Quicksilvers, Cubes, and MDD's.

     YMMV,

						Joe Gurman
-- 
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by."
                                                             - Douglas 
Adams, 1952 - 2001

Joseph B. Gurman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar Physics
Branch, Greenbelt MD 20771 USA