On Aug 31, 2006, at 2:33 AM, Maurits van de Kamp wrote: >> You should never let the free space on an OS10 system disk go below >> 10 gigs or you are asking for trouble in the worst way. > > That's strange, I'm running Tiger on my iBook with only 10 gigs of > harddisk space in total, just about 400MB free, no problems at all. Interesting but as others have said they start running into problems with even more free space than you have. I don't know the answer. >> OS10 uses >> the system disk as a kind of Virtual memory and unfortunately there >> is just no way to take control of this and turn it off even if you >> have tons of RAM and no need of that kind of virtual memory. > > If you have tons of RAM and no need for extra memory, no swap space > (which is what you are referring to as "virtual memory") will be > used. The fact that you think it does, may have to do with this wrong > terminology; people look at their process monitor or similar apps and > think that the amount of "virtual memory" is the amount of harddisk > space used for swapping. It isn't. Virtual memory is a virtual (ie > not really existing) humongous addressing space that the applications > see, blissfully unaware of tricks like shared code space, protection, > memory defragmentation and, once your physical memory is full despite > these tricks, swapping. > >> (This >> is actually one of the things I really hate about OS10, OS9 was much >> superior in this particular regard IMO). > > OSX memory management is way superiour (in the aspects mentioned > above). The "off"-switch of OS9 doesn't really compensate for that. > All that would add to this is applications dieing horribly with > failed memory allocations when your physical memory is full, despite > the fact that swapping would have saved you. That is not my recollection of what happened in OS9 when there was not enough memory. Usually you were just told you were out of memory and reallocating your memory (if you had the memory to allocate to) did the trick. Also there was a distinct drop in the number of tracks you could playback in Logic from a given machine that happened when logic went OSX. Do you think it is possible that all the tricky stuff that you mention OSX doing instead of the more rudimentary OS9 approach could have been the reason. I know some OSX advocates who are always screaming about how wonderful it is because it is a generic general purpose OS. I have the feeling that is exactly the problem. Music production demands a lot out of a CPU and the more you can configure the system to meet the demands the application is going to put on it the better off you will be. Whereas OS9 allowed you to do things like allocate memory yourself to the applications you wanted and needed to use as many CPU cycles as you could get it to OSX says "no no no let us determine what your priorities are". I liked the OS 9 attitude better.