5 ms·

I think you must be looking at the total memory for the apps (including shared libraries, etc), because I ran OSX with 512MB for five years without much trouble

by tsuraan 18y ago

I think you must be looking at the total memory for the apps (including shared libraries, etc), because I ran OSX with 512MB for five years without much trouble. I typically had mail, opera, and tons of terminals open, and there was still typically around 40MB of free memory. Upgrading my laptop to 2GB did allow me to run safari and webkit and iTunes (now that's a hog) at the same time, which was definitely nicer, but I never really felt crippled by only having 512MB before that.

Zev 18y ago
Are you still running Panther on that machine? If so, try running Leopard on 512mb ram.
- tsuraan 18y ago
  It's currently running X.5, whatever cat that is associated with. I did have to disable the background indexing stuff (searchlight?) due to my blazing fast 4200 RPM drive, but it ran pretty well with 512MB. Spaces even worked. Things were better with 2GB, but it was completely usable for what I needed, which was email, a light browser, and terminals galore.
xenophanes 18y ago
As I said, that's the RSIZE column from activity monitor. Safari is now 532 rsize, 562 rprvt, and 69 rshrd. It's a lot less if you restart it more often and have less windows open. itunes is not a memory hog by comparison. it's using 62/30/32 in the same order.
- tsuraan 18y ago
  Are you running 64-bit? I wonder if the size difference is due to that. I've heard 64-bit processes are bigger, due to larger pointers and longs, but I wouldn't expect things to be so amazingly huge. I certainly couldn't have survived on 512MB if my computer were using memory the way yours is. Also, have you tried using webkit nightlies? I found that they were much more memory-friendly than safari, especially with flash disabled.
  - xenophanes 18y ago
    32 bit. i don't have to try webkit nightlies, or restart safari, because i have enough ram. ram saves my time. which was kind of the point of the article :)

by tsuraan 18y ago

Zev 18y ago

Are you still running Panther on that machine? If so, try running Leopard on 512mb ram.

tsuraan 18y ago
It's currently running X.5, whatever cat that is associated with. I did have to disable the background indexing stuff (searchlight?) due to my blazing fast 4200 RPM drive, but it ran pretty well with 512MB. Spaces even worked. Things were better with 2GB, but it was completely usable for what I needed, which was email, a light browser, and terminals galore.

xenophanes 18y ago

As I said, that's the RSIZE column from activity monitor. Safari is now 532 rsize, 562 rprvt, and 69 rshrd. It's a lot less if you restart it more often and have less windows open. itunes is not a memory hog by comparison. it's using 62/30/32 in the same order.

tsuraan 18y ago
Are you running 64-bit? I wonder if the size difference is due to that. I've heard 64-bit processes are bigger, due to larger pointers and longs, but I wouldn't expect things to be so amazingly huge. I certainly couldn't have survived on 512MB if my computer were using memory the way yours is. Also, have you tried using webkit nightlies? I found that they were much more memory-friendly than safari, especially with flash disabled.
- xenophanes 18y ago
  32 bit. i don't have to try webkit nightlies, or restart safari, because i have enough ram. ram saves my time. which was kind of the point of the article :)