> 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. That depends on the program running out of memory; if the programmer has built safeguards around every memory allocation, it will work nicely. If not, the program will just crash if it tries to allocate memory when it can't. > 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. Probably not, but certainly OSX places a heavier load on your CPU than OS9. > 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. Ah but IS it a problem? If it is, stick to dedicated harddisk recorders or an accelerated Atari Falcon (the ultimate example of what you're trying to say; I don't think any mac with any OS could mix 16 tracks in Cubase Audio with a 16MHz CPU). The reason we're buying all this new stuff is because we want to do more; and with every generation the "relative power" (stuff you can do devided by the CPU speed) will be less and less, though the resulting total power increases with every generation. > 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. That depends on what you mean by "better"; the system will be more powerful yes, but also more difficult to maintain, more difficult to support, less stable, and software will be more expensive (because the developers have to continue developing their own sound systems for example, for lack of generic OS support - it's more software- efficient yes, but not more money-efficient). > 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". No, this is definitely not true. The amount of memory allocation is no longer a case of priority since every application can allocate what it needs (rather than what a user who has no knowledge of the internals wants it to get), meaning that memory will actually be devided more efficiently (!!) down to the last available byte, and the CPU cycles are devided based on the priorities _needed_ by the applications. Logic can tell the OS "hey I need to get the next sample out before this 1/44100th second passes" and the OS will give the appropriate thread the highest priority, which is a lot more efficient than a user arbitrarily giving priorities to entire applications and the OS not giving a damn. > I liked the OS 9 attitude better. I'm glad my car doesn't ask me for fuel injection parameters every time I start it. The system knows best and will do it more efficiently than you. I agree with you that OSX contains a lot of stuff that makes it bigger and in some aspects slower than OS9. But I don't agree that memory- and priority-management are the cause of that; they _improve_ the performance. Maurits.