[X4U] Tuning Tiger

[Jeff Porten]

On May 3, 2005, at 2:43 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> 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.

I think you're being a wee bit dense, only in that you're worrying  
about system calls at a level below where the OS is expecting you to  
care about it.  Sure, on Solaris you're expecting to know and deal  
with this.  Here, only if you want to.

I run my PowerBook with 1 Gb of RAM since that was the max when I got  
it, and I haven't yet felt the need to pick up bigger chips.  Trust  
me, I'm a power user -- not uncommon for me to have 30 apps open  
simultaneously.  When MenuMeters tells me I'm seriously thrashing, I  
log out and log back in.  I'm already noting that Tiger will probably  
be much more efficient at this, since it seems to be releasing VM  
much better than Panther did.

IOW, I don't agree with you that Macs are more RAM-hungry (although I  
don't have other Unix flavors as a reference).  If your system is  
running slow, get more.  Simple enough, no?

Best,
Jeff