Inspirational Technology

Mac OS X and RAM

One of the major criticisms of Mac OS X has been that it's sluggish. This is especially common among people who just play with the systems as they come stock. Clearly Mac OS X is a big advancement over previous OS platforms and is a bit sluggish on older hardware because of this. However, Apple isn't helping things much because it doesn't ship Macs with nearly enough RAM. I'm mentioning this now because I'm forced to run my dual processor 1.25Ghz Powermac on just the stock 256MB of RAM that came with it. It's so slow to run it this way, even with only a few applications open switching between apps takes way too long. It seems it's hitting swap every single time. It makes the machine feel like it's about 1/10 the speed that it really is. Until today I had 2GB of RAM and the machine ran extremely fast, I'd seen no sluggishness at all. Take out that RAM though and performance just dies. I consider it shameful that Apple is still shipping Macs with 128MB or 256MB of RAM. That's just not enough and will kill peoples impressions of system performance if they don't know any better. 256MB for a Windows XP box is perfectly acceptable for normal usage, Mac OS X needs at least 512MB and really I consider 1GB a realistic minimum. Some Macs, including the 12" Powerbook, don't even support 1GB. Even the base G5 only comes with 256MB stock, that's pathetic on a $2000 machine.

So you might ask why did I pull the RAM then? Well, while the machine was extremely fast, it was also extremely unstable. It seems the FW800 Powermacs are VERY picky about the RAM they use. I've had system instability with this machine from the day I got it and after two trips to the Apple store nothing was found. Because of the problem I was seeing, I suspected the third party RAM and spent many hours swapping sticks to try things out. At one point I even went out and bought two brand new 512MB sticks of RAM from a different brand and had the same problem with those. This left me with five 512MB sticks of RAM and I just couldn't believe that all of them were bad. Well, I'm now pretty convinced that they aren't bad, but they are all incompatible with the machine. Even though they're all the correct kind of RAM and from reasonable brands (Kingston and Simple Tech) they cause all kinds of random application crashes.

The situation was complicated because I have actually seen two different and unrelated problems with this machine. While diagnosing the first problem I ruled out RAM problems because it occurred with all the RAM I had, including the stock Apple RAM. It turns out it was a software problem that was freezing the GUI. Unfortunately, that problem also steered me down the wrong path toward resolving the second problem. In particular I didn't try the stock Apple RAM by itself again until yesterday. My main test for the instability was playing Warcraft III. I've never been able to play it without it crashing within about 10 minutes, happens every single time. Last night with the stock 256MB of RAM only, I was finally able to play it for a couple hours. It's the first time I've ever actually had to manually quit the game, prior to that it was always nice enough to just quit for me.

So, the moral of this story is that if you have a PowerMac, buy lots of RAM and ALSO make sure it's from a vendor well known for Apple compatibility. From what I've seen from reading the support forums on Apple's site, Crucial seems to be the safest place. I ordered two more sticks of 512MB RAM from them last night, hopefully it will actually work right.

With PCs I always bought the cheapest RAM I could find and never once had a problem, and I've owned a lot of PCs. I also never had any problems with the RAM I bought for my Cube and my Powerbook using that same philosophy. It makes me really wonder if there's a design flaw in these FW800 Powermacs that limits their RAM compatibility. There are a number of people posting on the Apple discussion boards that they have similar problems. What's so bad about this though, none of the memory tests detect the problem and the machine seems to work fine most of the time. It's just plagued with a higher then normal quantity of application crashes. Worse still, sometimes the application that crashes is the window server, this problem manifests itself as you being instantly logged out and taking all your open apps down with it. It's a nasty, nasty problem and extremely destructive to productivity.