Re: Reducing memory consumption
Re: Reducing memory consumption
- Subject: Re: Reducing memory consumption
- From: "Mark Wagner" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:15:16 -0700
On 10/12/06, Greg Guerin <email@hidden> wrote:
Mark Wagner wrote:
>17" Powerbook G4, already maxed out at a gigabyte.
Unless there's a lot of memory-hogs running, 1 GB RAM seems like it should
be enough to avoid swapping, even with Xcode and debugger running. I have
a dual G4 with 1 GB RAM, and I have to work pretty hard to get it to swap:
big processes with huge tracts of process-private (unshared) memory
allocations.
With everything I use on a regular basis being in a mostly swap-free
state, Activity Monitor shows: Xcode (around 150 MB), Safari (around
350 MB), Codewarrior (75 MB), the company email client (50 MB), and
assorted swapped-out applications such as the X server, Dashboard,
SimpleText, Terminal, OS helper apps, etc (100 MB). Between
WindowServer and kernel_task, the OS appears to be taking up another
250 MB. A "find in projects" in Xcode will result in much of this
being swapped out, as will loading an application into the debugger,
or the link stage of compiling.
>Activity Monitor doesn't appear to indicate swapping.
Are you saying that Activity Monitor indicates no swapping is occurring, or
are you saying that it doesn't tell you about swapping?
Doesn't tell me about swapping.
The System Memory pane has a "Page ins/outs:" counter. A page-out is a
swap-out. If that number remains at 0, then your machine is not swapping
out. It may be swapping in, which is a page-in, but probably only if lots
of programs have large working sets of executables.
The description had me looking for a per-application number, so I
didn't see that.
What does the Disk Activity pane show when this time-consuming context
switch occurs? If swapping is really occurring, there should be a deluge
of disk activity.
I don't need the Disk Activity pane to tell me there's swapping going
on: I can *hear* the disk thrashing for five minutes. It's how I know
when I need to look up from whatever I've found to do.
>Real is just how much physical RAM a process is using.
I think "real" is how much memory is really being used: RSIZE, in 'top'
terms. That is, I think it's "real as in allocated", rather than "real the
opposite of virtual".
The numbers in the "real" column of Activity Monitor add up to just
about 1 GB, and I can watch the numbers go up and down as different
processes swap in and out.
This interpretation would mean that RSIZE tells you
the total size of potentially swappable memory for that process. Other
values tell you what's being paged out and in overall, but none I see for
top or Act Mon that tell what's paging out per-process. Also, 'top -S' can
show system-wide swapping details that Activity Monitor doesn't, so you may
want to use it instead.
On a side note, can you change the setting in your mail client that's
generating the redundantly redundant "Re:" subject-line prefixes?
4-in-a-row is getting Re:-diculous. See subject lines here:
<http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2006/Oct/index.html>
If it's a bug, please file a bug-report against Gmail.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Gmail doesn't show the
subject line except for the first message in a thread, so I had no way
of knowing it was happening.
--
Mark Wagner
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Xcode-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden