1 GB RAM not enough for Panther?

[kbeartx]

MDD dual 867, 1 GB RAM, 10.3.9

Gets VERY sluggish periodically for brief intervals.

Alert readers will recall that I asked about this some time ago in a post titled something like, "MDD busy w/ processes not shown in Activity Monitor".

My Theory-du-Jour is that the page-ins and page-outs of RAM data to the HD are what's making the system unresponsive intermittently.

Any ideas about how I can prove or disprove this theory, short of adding more RAM, which I can't afford to do right now?  

And shouldn't a full gig o' rams be enuff?

[krissel]

Normally I would say if you see a lot of page outs relative to 'ins' that you need more memory. But look at the number of Free memory when you are experiencing these slow downs. I've run sometimes for hours and have no page outs but other times I may have around 2,000 outs combined with 30,000 ins and still have over 900MB of free memory (I have 1.37G). Now why is that? It surely doesn't mean I need more memory. What I  imagine is that some software is less adept at using memory OR my processor, bus speed, etc. combo of hardware is creating some sort of block to the memory. OR OS X is not regulating the RAM vs VM very well.

Take your pick.

Maybe it's all of that.

IOW,  don't know...

[chriskleeman]

This problem occurs on my G4 MDD as well at times... seems to be related to, well, I haven't ever figured it out completely... Usually, the culprit is Mozilla when I'm in Composer doing html editing.

I generally restart the program and the sluggishness goes away. I have 1Gig of RAM, and the machine actually works better than when I had another 512MB installed... stilll can't figure out if that is a bad memory module, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

CK

[krissel]

Some reading on page in/outs and the swap file:

http://macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=47648

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...query=swap+file

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20030811093044415

[Parker]

a gig of ram being hogged in 10.3???

I survive with a gig in 10.4.8 on my MacBook and 640mb on my iBook
and i had 768mb in my PowerBook
all using tiger