Help! Memory Allocation for SL under Mac OS X

I was always wondering, why SL runs so much slower on my Mac than on my (smaller) Windows Machine. I read in a lot of other posts (lots of info here: /111/3b/35471/1.html), that RAM should be 1G or more. OK, so I went out and bought more. The result: still slow and LOADS of swapping. In some Sims every single step of my AV causes heavy disk activity.

The cause: I've checked the memory allocation and it seems that the system (OS X) only gives around 380 MBytes of RAM to SL. I would understand if RAM was scarce. But No! More than 250 MBytes is still free! And more than 500 MBytes ist listed as 'inactive'. Aaaaargh!

Does anyone have an idea, how to reserve/allocate more memory to an application, prioritize it higher ... in OS X?

Everything the Apple docs seem to say is: don't worry about that, the system will handle it perfectly. But it doesn't. Quite the contrary: it lets half of the physical memory laying around while a memory hungry application is swapping like crazy.

Are you sure that it's swapping that you are encountering? Remember that SL does use a disk cache, which is more likely what you are seeing.

The system won't allocate swap unless it does not have physical memory to allocate. There will, however, always be swap in use.

as si said SL does have a disk cache, up to a gig. so the disk activity may be that. OS X does handle the memory quite well without you needing to do anything, if you like playing in the terminal you can change SL's nice setting to give it higher priority for the CPU, which may help. what else are you trying to run at the same time as SL? and what hardware are you running on? those can be big factors in how SL runs.
also inactive isnt the number you should be looking at, if you had 500 megs free that would be an issue.



jester



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