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I finally made it through a whole week -- eight days in fact at this point -- without booting into OS 9 on either machine, a personal best record since I switched to OS X for production. I’m mainly using the Pismo these days, as it is happily running 10.2.4, and I’m not inclined to play Russian roulette with my battery and modem support by upgrading to 10.2.4 on the iBook, which still has 10.2.1 installed. During the past week, the memory usage on the Pismo has been pretty much constantly maxed out since the first day. I’ve been using Camino instead of Mozilla and have cut back to two browsers instead of three (iCab is the other), which has evidently helped a bit. Camino doesn’t seem to be has memory-greedy as Mozilla 1.3, and while the Memory Stick bar indicates just a sliver of free memory most of the time, the pageout chime has not been sounding excessively often. I have had to quit and restart Classic Mode three times, and logged out and back in again once during the week, but I haven’t done any complete restarts. However, performance has become increasingly flaky over the past several days. When I hide POPMonitor, it takes Tex Edit Plus with it, for instance, something that the logout/login didn’t cure, and the browsers occasionally only go into spinning beach ball mode. Program icons bounce forever when launching. These things don’t happen after a fresh restart. General Finder performance also deteriorated steadily over the first three days, then seemed to hit a plateau, and has only gradually worsened, if at all, since then. One loses one’s frame of reference over time. I did discover an extraordinary thing by accident. When I was checking out the Devon EasyFind 2.6 disks search utility for Odyssey 282, I found that running a search with EasyFind would cause the system to “give back” a BIG chunk of free memory. Like one quarter to one third of the yellow segment of the Memory Stick bar. 
Before running EasyFind 
After running EasyFind And in some instances the recovery is even more dramatic than shown in these shots. Very weird, and I’m sure this is an unintended “feature” of Easy Find, but it does seem to indicate that the system is holding onto memory it doesn’t need. However, freeing up that block of unused memory doesn’t seem to alleviate the cumulative Finder slowdown. Only a full restart does that, temporarily. Perhaps I’ll eventually get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, except for the slowdown issue, I’m quite enjoying working in the OS X. What I miss about OS 9 is mainly its raw speed.
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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