the memory hog known as OS X

lithium · 29 Mar 2004, 11:15 AM

I got my ibook in the other day. It came with 128 megs of ram. I knew that'd suck so I ordered a 512mb dimm. But for crissakes, OS X uses all of my memory! I can juuuuuuuust barely use a web browser or text editor. The memory manager pages like crazy, I'm just sitting there constantly paging. Doing actual work? Forget it. OS X is nice and all, but it's a friggin fat hog. Is there any way to reduce its footprint?

**Nomi** · 29 Mar 2004, 01:14 PM

What iBook do you have?

I don't have a whole lot of advice, but you can try getting it upped to as close to a gig as possible. I have a gig in my 800mhz flat-panel iMac and it runs a LOT better than it did with only 512 installed. I know the iBooks have different limits depending on what base RAM it shipped with, but you can get that changed by any Apple dealer/reseller.

I'll wait for Mike to step in, he's cooler with this stuff

lithium · 29 Mar 2004, 01:18 PM

It's a G3 800.

I'll have 640MB total in a few days. That should be fine. If it's not, then that's pretty sad. My needs are meager, mostly just programming. I won't be doing graphics or sound or anything like that.

It's a gorgeous machine, I'm very happy with it except for the memory issue. Apple has really got making laptops down pat; best laptops on the market IMO.

**Kenshin** · 29 Mar 2004, 01:20 PM

Umm... I've used OSX 10.2 on a 233MHz iMac with 160MB of RAM.

It worked suprisingly well. Perfectly usable, even with multiple page browsing in Safari. (With RealPlayer or iTunes running in the background.)

Don't know what problem you have...

**Nomi** · 29 Mar 2004, 01:25 PM

Are you (lithium) on 10.1, 10.2 or 10.3? I was assuming 10.3 (Panther) since you said you just got it. I figured it may run a little differently than 10.2 (Jaguar, which I have).

lithium · 29 Mar 2004, 01:26 PM

My main need is to run Eclipse, which is a Java program. Java needs a lot of memory. But on say, a Linux box with 128 megs, I can run Eclipse and lots of other things just fine. Eclipse literally takes minutes to come up on my ibook, and seconds to minutes of waiting to do anything, as the machine is paging like crazy.

It is 10.3