🚀 go-pugleaf

spodosaurus <spodosaurus@_yahoo_.com> wrote:

> Adrian wrote:
> > spodosaurus <spodosaurus@_yahoo_.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I would leave Outlook Express alone. Unless your friend is very low on
> > RAM there is no problem running 2 applications. Are you aware that you
> > can manually alter the amount of RAM which the system allocates to the
> > applications in use? Browsers benefit from having plenty of RAM
> > available.
> > 
> 
> How do I do this? Netscape 7.02 runs so slow due to constantly swapping
> to hard disk cache that it's virtually unusable (though it does render
> the web pages correctly, which is what we wanted). Apparently the system
> has 32mb of ram and a 6GB hard drive. She's wanting to add more RAM, so
> now I must figure out how to do this on an imac as well as which type of
> RAM it takes. I increased a disk cache setting from the default of 64mb
> to 128mb and it improved performance somewhat when running netscape 
> 7.02, but not nearly enough to make the program usable.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Ari


Ah, well ... 32MB RAM is certainly going to be a problem. I suspect that
to get things working at all this iMac will be running the System with a
fair amount of Virtual Memory (look in Memory control panel .. you can
set it here .. or disable it completely if you have real RAM). In many
ways you are fighting a losing battle in the memory stakes. If I am
right about Virtual Memory then the OS is already using relatively slow
disk memory to compensate for lack of real RAM. If you had a load of RAM
to work with then allocating more for the application may well help ..
but not if all the RAM is already used up.

When in the Finder, if you click on the Apple Menu ... top left corner
... and choose About this Computer (or About this Macintosh on earlier
machines) you will get an information box which lets you know the over
all picture in relation to memory usage. If applications are open it
will show their RAM usage. It will also show the largest contiguous
block of memory which remains available. If Virtual Memeory is being
used this will include disk as well as real RAM.

Anyway, for interest's sake here is the low down in terms of old style
Mac OS application memory management. If you click once to select an
application icon (one that isn't already running) and then choose Get
Info from the File Menu. You should see an option to show memory
information ... you can alter the memory allocation here. Basically when
you launch an application it will grab the amount of RAM you set here
... some applications can crash or freeze if they don't have enough
memory allocated. In the case of a 32MB iMac depending on VM for even
its basic functionality you will, unfortunately gain little from more
memory allocation, I would guess.

Unless somone has a very cheap 128MB RAM module for you (which would
enable you to turn off the System wide Virtual Memory and allocate a
bucket of RAM to the browser) you may be struggling to get a whole lot
more speed out of later version Netscape, IMHO. I can no longer remember
the details but to reduce disk thrashing we used to use a hack to force
Netscape to cache in RAM (if you had plenty) and turn off the disk cache
... it sort-of worked!


-- 
Adrian