[Info-vax] swap and page files

[Paul Sture]

In article <kbuaqr$h4p$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
 glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> (snip)
> > Just want to point one thing out, in all this bickering.
> > Run an OS X box for a month without rebooting, and it will be paging 
> > heavily, and the results are much worse than an old VMS box.
> > Todays machines (well OSes) are designed for regular reboots.
> > The memory is used rather aggressively for disk caching, and eventually 
> > you'll be out of memory, and your processes will be paging a lot, since 
> > disk caching is regarded as a more useful usage of memory than for 
> > processes.
> 
> I am reading this on a PPC Mac Mini with the full 1GB, running 10.5.8,
> which has now been up 127 days.

I had similar uptimes on my PPC iBook and PowerBook.  As I have 
previously mentioned a logout/login sequence would bring them back to 
normal speeds if the swapfiles got too large and things got bogged down 
(sometimes just quitting everything and waiting would achieve the same 
results, sometimes not).

> It isn't the OS that has paging problems, but the web browser. Every few
> days (depending on use) I stop and restart Safari. Then use the
> "open all windows from previous session" menu item to get back where
> I was. Safari seems a little better than Firefox in memory usage.

I use a Safari Extension called Sessions, which automatically gives me a 
Save / Restore dialogue on startup.  I can't find it in the Apple Safari 
Extensions library, but there is another one which appears to offer 
similar functionality.

With the original 2GB RAM supplied with my Intel Mac mini, I was having 
sufficient performance problems with Safari that I switched to using 
Firefox.  Until a couple of versions ago FF would quite often throw a 
wobbly on restoring open tabs at startup (and display an apology that it 
couldn't do this).  I haven't seen that for a while so assume that 
problem has been addressed.

Although Mozilla no longer support the PPC platform, you might be 
interested in these links:

Anewer PPC version of Firefox -

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

and a newer PPC version of Thunderbird -

http://sourceforge.jp/projects/tenfourbird/


> Much less often, I close and reopen Adobe reader.

I don't have that on any of my systems.

>  
> > I hate having to reboot machines twice a month. (Or course, mandatory 
> > updates means you often have to reboot that often anyway...)
> 
> Even my Win2K machine stays up months at a time. 

I had long uptimes with NT4, but that was on hardware specifically put 
together with that O/S in mind and it wasn't connected to the internet 
except for short periods.  I also did my surfing on VMS or Linux.

-- 
Paul Sture