1 GB of RAM comment from Apple
- Thread starter solrac
- Start date
lurk
Mitä?
I think that this is just marketing speek for it won't swap 
As for a ram disk or turning off virtual memory for osx is also a total waste. The only way that I can see a ramdisk disk appearing ot make things faster would be because you have to effectivly load the whole thing into memory at once, so you will pay the price up front. Allowing the system to cache things will most likely have a much lower amortized cost but you may feel it more since you would have gone to get coffee durring the upfront costs. That said, the ram you bind up in a disk is not available for programs so you may swap more and thereby eliminate all of the benifits you had after paying the higher upfront costs.
Turn off the VM you say well then if you run out of memory you won't swap your app will then just die when it runs out of memory. And if it doesn't allocate enought memory to die it wouldn't have allocated enough to swap.
Look at this info from top on my box whihc has been up for a while and has lots of junk running on it...
Look at that I have almost 6 Gigs of stuff in VM but I only have 12 pagouts which are what really become expencsive. I also have 14k pageins that is stuff actually pulled off the disk. I am not 100% positive but if OSX uses 4k pages that ammounts to 56MB of data which have been read in which is like 1/1000th of the ammount of VM space I have in use. The reason for this is that lots tricks can be used in the VM system to significantly reduce the actual ammount of copying performed. Things like copy-on-write, dirty bits and a special zero page can do wonders. If I was doing something similar in the old days I basically would have had to move atleast that 5.76 G of data through my machine either to put it on the ram disk or to load it into memory since there is no VM there to do that lazyly for me.
At the end of the day I cannot see how that could be faster in any way shape or form. But then I am an old Unix weenie and not an old Mac weenie being reletively new to the fold.
-Eric
As for a ram disk or turning off virtual memory for osx is also a total waste. The only way that I can see a ramdisk disk appearing ot make things faster would be because you have to effectivly load the whole thing into memory at once, so you will pay the price up front. Allowing the system to cache things will most likely have a much lower amortized cost but you may feel it more since you would have gone to get coffee durring the upfront costs. That said, the ram you bind up in a disk is not available for programs so you may swap more and thereby eliminate all of the benifits you had after paying the higher upfront costs.
Turn off the VM you say well then if you run out of memory you won't swap your app will then just die when it runs out of memory. And if it doesn't allocate enought memory to die it wouldn't have allocated enough to swap.
Look at this info from top on my box whihc has been up for a while and has lots of junk running on it...
Look at that I have almost 6 Gigs of stuff in VM but I only have 12 pagouts which are what really become expencsive. I also have 14k pageins that is stuff actually pulled off the disk. I am not 100% positive but if OSX uses 4k pages that ammounts to 56MB of data which have been read in which is like 1/1000th of the ammount of VM space I have in use. The reason for this is that lots tricks can be used in the VM system to significantly reduce the actual ammount of copying performed. Things like copy-on-write, dirty bits and a special zero page can do wonders. If I was doing something similar in the old days I basically would have had to move atleast that 5.76 G of data through my machine either to put it on the ram disk or to load it into memory since there is no VM there to do that lazyly for me.
At the end of the day I cannot see how that could be faster in any way shape or form. But then I am an old Unix weenie and not an old Mac weenie being reletively new to the fold.
-Eric
michaelsanford
Translator, Web Developer
A sidenote about extra RAM; my dad just got a Dell 2.2GHz with 2 GB of RAM and it works about as fast as my TFT 700MHz with 786 RAM.
WHY he decided to get that much RAM is beyond me; the thing that really frustrated him was that he can no longer run DBASE II in XP
But hey that's ok! I just pirate resources like Bryce Lightning over the LAN ha!
WHY he decided to get that much RAM is beyond me; the thing that really frustrated him was that he can no longer run DBASE II in XP
But hey that's ok! I just pirate resources like Bryce Lightning over the LAN ha!