Inspirational Technology

1GB RAM

Today I finally broke down and upgraded my powerbook to 1GB RAM. Mac OS X just gets too sluggish once it starts paging and 512MB wasn't enough to keep it out given my usage patterns. So far it's been great with no page outs at all, we'll see how it goes after a few days when the buffer cache starts filling up. I'd assume it doesn't page out in that scenario, at least I hope so. Have to keep an eye on Safari though, seems to leak memory pretty badly.

The Mac OS X VM system explains the phantom performance increase people think they see each time an OS upgrade or any other change happens that requires a reboot. It's not that things are necessarily faster, it's just that OS X hasn't reached the point where it is paging data out of memory yet. My system is quite snappy when it's not paging, but once it starts paging stuff out it begins to feel like mud. It's kind of disappointing as I've never noticed the VM system so obviously affecting performance during routine paging on any other system. Obviously, if it gets to the point of thrashing it's always noticable, but otherwise, simple paging usually isn't this bad.

Apple needs to start shipping systems with 1GB standard, especially desktops that have cheaper RAM.