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Several readers have been encouraging me to check out the little Memory Stick all OS X RAM usage utility, and over the weekend I finally got around to installing and (I've had it downloaded for some time). The readers were right -- Memory Stick is a cold and informative little hack that does a very nice job of monitoring your OS X memory usage.And as with the Do I Need More Memory? 1.0 utility I checked out in OS X Odyssey 260, it revealed that the 640 MB of RAM I have in both my laptops, which seems so luxuriously expansive in OS 9, is no more than enough when running OS X with the suite of applications I use. MemoryStick 1.1 is a tool by Matt Neuburg to graphically display RAM usage data under Mac OS X. You can instantly see how full your RAM is getting, and optionally uses sound to signal "pageouts." If not enough RAM is available, OS X will "page out" memory from physical RAM to the hard disk (ie: virtual memory). Unfortunately, pageouts will slow down your computer, particularly when you are requesting significantly more memory than you have physical RAM. Frequent pageouts are a sign that you are thrashing the hard disk and could probably use more RAM.
Here are some excerpts from the Memory Stick Help file on OS X RAM usage:
"The first thing you'll notice when you start up MemoryStick is that there are no applications listed. This is because in Mac OS X there are not distinct application heaps as in previous systems. Instead, every application is given the illusion that it has huge quantities of RAM available to it (much more than you probably have). Mac OS X maintains this illusion by means of its memory management system.
"Under this system, Mac OS X loads into RAM the resources (bits of code, data, and so forth) that are actually needed. An application's actual RAM usage is thus dynamic. If an application loads all the data from a small document, it uses a small amount of RAM; if it loads all the data from a large document, it uses a large amount of RAM. If an applications quits, some of these resources are no longer needed, and RAM usage goes down (but, as MemoryStick reveals, not as much as one might expect)...."
MemoryStick allows you to see how your RAM is being used.... it tells you four things:
• How full is your RAM?
"...After you quit an application, Mac OS X does not give back all the RAM it occupied while that application was running. After a while, your RAM might get very full....it's not necessarily a bad thing if you're generating multiple swapfiles; but it is a measure of how much stress is being put on the virtual memory system through pageouts - plus each swapfile takes some room on the hard disk (though not much, just under 80MB), and the only way to get rid of the extra ones is to restart the computer" Aye; there's the rub. One of the purported advantages of OS X is that you are supposed to be able to go for days or weeks without a restart, but with my Pismo PowerBook, especially since installing Jaguar, I've found that performance deteriorates so badly after about three days of production uptime that I am obliged to restart anyway. This contrasts with my experience in OS 9, which usually averages 5-6 days before the memory gets corrupted to the point where I'm flirting with a crash or lockup, although I've gone as long as 15 days (full production schedule) in OS 9.1 without restarting. When I was using the Pismo as a backup machine for experimenting with OS X in the early days, I went I think more than six weeks once without restarting, but I've never lasted more than four doing production work. Memory Stick explains why. Here's how it works: MemoryStick's basic display is purely graphical. You see a window representing your whole RAM, and you see how full it is. Your RAM usage is displayed as four categories, each represented by a different color... You can hover the mouse over a color, though, to learn what it means and to see some numbers. The four categories are: 
• Wired. Wired resources are those that are absolutely needed by Mac OS X in order to run; they are so fundamental that they will never be paged out, so this part of your RAM will never decrease (nor, I believe, will it increase). • Active. Active resources are those that have been loaded because some application needs them, and are important enough that they won't be paged out. • Inactive. These will usually be the predominant category. Inactive resources are those that are candidates for paging out if necessary. Your inactive resources usage will grow and shrink over time. Think of it as a kind of scratch region of RAM. • Free. If the free region of RAM decreases enough, you'll probably start getting some pageouts. That is not necessarily a bad thing, unless it's happening more often than you really want. If it is, a solution might be to quit some apps, close some windows, or restart the computer. In the Options menu are two preferences you can turn on and off. They are: • Work In Background. If this is off, then MemoryStick does nothing whatever unless it is the frontmost app. MemoryStick is a very small application, but obviously when it is working it does periodically have to poll the system to learn how RAM is being used. This only happens in very short bursts every so often; in the several seconds between these bursts, MemoryStick does absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, those short bursts do keep your disk active; so you might want the ability to turn MemoryStick off, in effect, when it isn't frontmost. That's what this option is for. • Signal Pageouts. If this is on, then if MemoryStick is working, it will make a "cling" noise every time it notices that there have been some pageouts since it last polled the system. 
The Preferences dialog also lets you customize all colors displayed by MemoryStick., and lets you specify where your swapfiles are. When I first started Memory Stick and opened my email programs and a browser, here is what my memory usage looked like. The most important segments are the yellow, which indicates inactive memory, and the white on the right, which indicates remaining free memory. 
However, within an hour, after starting up four or five more applications and doing some work, the free memory had shrunk appreciably, and continued to do so through the day. 
By the end of the day, I was beginning to get audible pageout warnings, and the Memory Stick readout looked like this: 
I haven't restarted yet at this writing, but I expect that I will before the day is out, in fact as soon as I get my stories posted for today, as the sluggishness has become intolerable, applications quitting unbidden, everything dog-slow, drag & drop support crapped out, the Memory Stick pageout warning chiming like a ship's bell in a rough sea, etc. The truth is now revealed. All these months, the thing has been running out of memory, and it's only been booted into OS x for 2 1/2 days. I'm not impressed. The answer, I suppose, would be more RAM, but having to have more than 640 MB for the sort of work I do seems absurd, and the iBook is maxed out at 640 MB anyway. It kind of negates the OS X stability advantage when you have to restart every couple of days anyway to recover decent performance. As Matt Neuberg notes:
MemoryStick is a Cocoa application, and a quick download at a tiny 106k. It is freeware, and definitely worth downloading.
More on broadband in N.S. Broadband And The Boonies Hello from Massachusetts Boonie Banter Broadband Access in the Boonies Re: Time and Date Time/date problems with 10.2.4 re- OSX updates From David Meyer I've been using Captain FTP for a while now and am generally happy with it. Perhaps the FTP program you favor is faster, or prettier, or whatever, but I am no longer really interested in the details. As a Unix-familiar OS X user I have so many options that more are simply so much excess. Besides Captain FTP, I have ftp at the command line (works fine), ftp within BBEdit, ftp in my site management software, and I know I'm forgetting something else. Developers who do things likely to lead to the use of ftp are building the software in so you can do the "open/modify/save" shuffle without extra steps due to remote location. For people who are interested in downloading files, the only reason for Fetch or Captain FTP is fear of the Command Line. OK, the CLI can be daunting with ftp - no denials there. As said, I have been uing Captain FTP. It works for me, even if something else might work 'better'. A new dual 1GHz CPU system would also work better for me, but there's no sense in insisting on "the best" when it changes every few months (or less). Captain FTP also features a two-pane window, and I agree that is a great feature.
Hi David;
I like Captain FTP too, and it has a pretty interface as well. (See OS X Odyssey 212) It's been my main OS X FTP client for the past year or so.
However, the speed of Vicom FTP Client X is amazing -- worth checking out.
Charles
From: Mark Rushton Charles, Good column today :) The pics were a nice bonus! If you ever are in Halifax, Odds are pretty good that you will be able to find a Wireless connection to do your delayed downloads. My last "wardrive" through the city turned up 18 networks (some open, some closed, very few with WEP, but hopefully they're running a VPN at least) along Lower Water St. and Barrington St. And the good folks at the Westin are particularly helpful: I often travel between Halifax and Oxford, where my folks live, by bus. On the return to Halifax I find myself writing a lot of email (good time to get caught up). As the bus terminal is located at the Westin (where the VIA rail station also is located), I can have my mail queued and sent by the time that we pull up to the ramp. The Westin's 802.11 network is powerful enough to be picked up about half a block away, which is usually just the right amount of time to send/receive email and get the laptop packed away for disembarking. Chebucto Community Net, as I may have mentioned, is working on WiFi coverage for Peninsular Halifax (and as much of the surrounding area as we can reach). We're testing a short-range access point at our office on Dalhousie campus. Stage 2 will likely be a larger antenna on campus, with the eventual rollout of a few antennas on top of Fenwick Tower (tallest building on the Peninsula). It's moving in fits and starts, as volunteer-led projects often do, but we're all pretty keen on it. As always, enjoying your column,
Regards,
PS: Did you see that drivel in the National Post about Apple being destined for obscurity?
Hi Mark;
Yes; a friend in the law and order sector in Halifax tells me that they have been doing some wardriving around the city for research purposes, and there's lots of action.
Back in the early '70s when the building was under construction, I one time climbed to the top floor of Fenwick Tower by stairs (construction site security was a lot laxer in those days ;-) ) It was a bit of a huff and puff even for then 20 year old legs and lungs. Wouldn't want to try it today.
I did see the National Post piece.
A gratuitous, unintelligent, factually inaccurate, and unhelpful diatribe. See New & Notable today.
Charles
From: Jeffrey Jaisli Dear Charles I couldn't agree with your article more. Although I must admit the whole issue is no longer relevant for me personally since as of last July we now have broadband access in my town. In fact, it's Optimum Online--one of the fastest Cable Modem networks in the country. I regularly get 3.2-3.5 Mbit/sec download speeds--it's nothing short of amazing. But before that I suffered through years of pathetic dial-up service. Since I'm so far from the local CO my speeds were awful and I would regularly suffer time outs and dropped connections. In fact it's one of the reasons why I wasn't an early adopter of OS X and only coming on board after 10.1 was released. I don't think I was ever able to connect at 56Kps. Until we had Optimum Online service my town had no DSL service and basically no choices. What's makes this particularly poignant is that I live in Ringwood, NJ. Oh we're a rural community, no doubt, being surrounded on 3 sides by mountains and on the fourth by a large reservoir and national park land with black bears in the area. But with no traffic on a Sunday morning I'm only a 30 minute drive from the George Washington bridge to Manhattan. So broadband isn't just a problem for true boonies. It's a miserable situation for some who live within the shadow of the largest city in the United States. After looking at the ridiculous size of the iPhoto 2 update I feel for everybody who's still waiting for broadband.
Kind regards,
Hi Jeffrey;
Glad to hear that you have a good, fast pipeline to the Internet now. Perhaps here someday.
Charles
From Christopher Richmond Charles, Just wanted to drop a line and say "Hi." from Massachusetts. I read your column on Applelinks quite often and agree (most of the time) with your comments. I definitely agree with your statement about who has access to broadband in your latest column. My parents live in Vermont. Few people in Vermont have access to DSL or cable. Most people that I know have only have dial up access. I think Apple is dropping the ball on this one. BTW, I also envy your situation (where you live). It sounds (and looks) beautiful. Take care up there and keep up the good work.
Chris Richmond
Hi Chris;
Thanks for the greeting. I've never been to Woburn, but Vermont is pretty spectacular.
Charles
From John H. Farr Well now Charles, that is some picture (smeltssr.jpg). I take it that's water. You will excuse me for not recognizing the stuff, which is in excruciatingly short supply in New Mexico, though that doesn't stop the idiot real estate developers or their minions from promoting the hell out of this beautiful place. My wife will probably emplane (is that a word? :-) for Canada when she sees where you live, but the lack of libraries and concert halls may give her second thoughts. (I, uh, have the same problem with her *here,* if the truth be known.) She's a pianist like your wife. Interesting, eh? Me, I like BOONIES! Living in Taos isn't nearly boonified enough for me. There are places not too far from here, however, that make where you're situated look positively cosmopolitan, but you have to bring your water with you. ALL of it ... As soon as figure out how to make some real money, I'm going to work this all out, I swear. John
Hi John;
It's water, but it's frozen. Those are ice fishing shacks atop it. It's a great place to swim and sail in the summer too. That shot was taken from my living room window, and the lake is right in front of our house. It's about three miles long and half a mile wide (I've swum (?) across and back, but I was a bit younger then. ;-)
There is a pretty good library (if they don't have what you're looking for, they'll get it on inter-library loan) in Sherbrooke (12 miles), and Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish has a nice concert hall with a busy cultural affairs schedule -- an hour's drive away.
Charles Broadband Access in the Boonies From Drew Moynihan I’m really not sure if this would be a viable option, and even if so you may be to far north, but take a look at the following links:
http://www.directpc.com/
It seems they now have two way Sat. Internet. A little pricey, but it could be worth it if you use a computer for a living. B. Drew Moynihan
Hi Drew;
Unfortunately, satellite Internet service is not available in this part of Canada, although it's a workaround, albeit an expensive one, where it's offfered.
Charles
From Frank Falcone Charles W. Moore wrote: Hi Frank; Nine months seems like awfully short life for a PRAM battery, and the manifestation of this problem at the time you installed 10.2.4 seems a bit too coincidental. Charles, Since starting up today and mailing you, the clock has crept 7 days. This is crazy!!! Frank Time/date problems with 10.2.4 From Constance Graves Hi Charles: I'm sure I won't be the only one responding to Frank Falcone's complaint about the time and date resetting itself to 1969 in OS 10.2.4. There is no problem with his hardware; it's apparently a "bug" in the OS. If he sets his time/date preference to access a network time server whenever he's online, his date and time will automatically be reset for him. Failing that, he'll have to set both manually every time he boots up. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next iteration of the OS. Connie From anon
Hello
Let's face it, we, the public, are all 'canon fodder' for Apple and M$. The phrase that springs to mind is, ' between the devil & the deep blue sea'.
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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