Apple has got to stop shipping computers with ridiculously low
amounts of memory. 128 MB simply isn't enough RAM to give OS X
breathing room, let alone let the user have several applications open
and switch among them efficiently.
Mac OS X is remarkable in that it can use virtual memory, but with a
pedestrian hard drive, swapping files between RAM and the hard drive is
a slow, cumbersome process. One of the best things Apple could do to
kill the perception that X is slow is to ship every Mac with a minimum
256 MB of memory.
Anything less will bolster OS X's reputation as a slow OS when the
real problem is often too little physical memory.
Stepping Back
I found out about that the hard way. The 512 MB module I purchased
from Coast to Coast
Memory turned out to be defective. Sometimes I could run the
eMac for an hour or two before it just locked up - the clock stopped
changing and it refused to accept a forced restart command
(cmd-opt-esc) from either the wireless keyboard or an old iMac keyboard
I plugged in.
Over the course of Wednesday things only got worse. By the end I
could barely reboot the eMac without it
going into a kernel panic, stopping while loading the OS, or not even
getting to the point of displaying the smiling folder icon.
Pull the memory (which was remarkably hot) - problem vanishes. So
our low-end eMac has lost 80% of it's memory, dropping from 640 MB to
128 MB. And that's just not enough memory to be productive when you're
running a dozen apps at once - and half of them in classic mode.
So I'm back to the low-end 400 MHz
TiBook, the slowest PowerBook G4 model Apple ever produced, and
because it has 512 MB of memory, I can work more efficiently on it than
on the memory challenged 700 MHz eMac. That's frustrating, because I
was just getting used to the eMac's speed and big 1280 x 960
display.
Moving Forward
One thing I did Wednesday night was install Retrospect on the
TiBook, connect an external 80 GB FireWire drive, and start doing
backup within OS X. Throughput for the first drive I backed up was
about 110 MB/min. using data compression. I expect to see better
performance when this task moves to the eMac.
This morning I backed up a second partition in the background, and
throughput was about 70 MB/min. - not bad at all considering how much
work I was doing and how little impact Retrospect had on that work.
More RAM
I recalled that we had ended up with a spare SIMM when we upgraded
our beige G3, so I scrounged it up, saw that it was PC100 on the label,
and installed it on the eMac. The eMac now has 192 MB of RAM, and that
should make a noticeable improvement, although I don't have time to use
the eMac this morning.
Now it's off to the Post Office to mail the bad RAM back to Coast to
Coast, and then off to the camera shop. Hope to test the eMac more
tonight and report back tomorrow.
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