Cool Mac Gear

Using the iBook for production has allowed me to stop obsessing about maxed out memory usage and frequent pageouts. The pageouts are still happening -- as of yesterday afternoon, with about five days of uptime since the last restart, PTHDesktop Monitor was showing 109,000 + pageouts recorded, and there were eight swap files in the /var/vm/ folder.

However, unlike my experience in OS X with my Pismo PowerBook, the iBook doesn’t slow down much as the free memory disappears and the swap files multiply. I provisionally attribute this to three factors:

1. The iBook is faster and supports Quartz Extreme, which makes Finder response much livelier in general.

2. I have about 4 GB of free space on the iBook’s OS X partition, as opposed to 1 GB on the Pismo.

3. The iBook’s 20 GB hard drive is faster than the similar capacity one in the Pismo.

Consequently, even though the frequency of pageouts I’m getting is far from ideal, it’s no longer cramping my style, and I’m able to pretty much ignore them most of the time, although it can still be annoying when certain programs bog down -- Eudora and Safari are particularly affected for some reason.

Boilerplate conventional wisdom would dictate getting more RAM, but unfortunately, the iBook is already maxed out to its RAM capacity of 640 MB. I do close programs I only use occasionally more than I used to do with the OS 9, but it seems that memory use soon expands to eat up any free memory anyway.

The upshot is that I seem to end up rebooting OS X nearly as often as I did OS 9 -- roughly every five or six days. I’m not entirely free of forced restarts either. Yesterday afternoon, I woke the iBook, went to open a file, and the screen dimmed, locked up, and displayed a dialog informing me that I had to restart the computer by holding down the Power key or hitting the Reset button. That has happened two or three times before on the iBook, and at least once on the Pismo, and is a lot less warning (ie: none) then OS 9 usually provided before crapping out. Making sure to save frequently is thus no less an imperative in OS X that was in OS 9 -- protected memory notwithstanding.

It will be nice if both memory management and system stability are addressed and improved in Panther.

Charles W. Moore