Word significantly slows down operation of other programs. Please help.

[Phillip M. Jones, CE.T.]

I hope you don't mean that like it sounds!




Elliott, you've completely misunderstood this program. (Hey, you're
right, that *is* fun....)

))) m.

I opened it and even with Excel/Word open I still had 85% memory left.

Of course I have 1.5 GB on this G4-500.

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[kimnjerry]

Thanks to Elliott for the concern, however, I do not have a Terminal
illness. Hemorrhoids, perhaps, but that's another story.

Matt's program is about as clear as anything I've encountered, and it
gives me basic information I can comprehend easily. There's a simple
foundation to tell me what's going on, and I can learn more if needed.
Activity Monitor and Terminal are certainly helpful to the informed,
but much more confusing to the novice...or, at least, they take some
study to understand.

Those of us who use these machines for the functions that Office
(e.g.,) and a browser provide and little more are generally not used to
climbing under the hood to tune the engine. Therefore, because I don't
know what I don't know, the above-mentioned utilities are intimidating
in structure, function, content, and language. And it's as meaningless
for people to tell me that I just need to learn it as it is for me to
tell someone that they just need to get up and speak comfortably to
3,000 people.

This discussion has been very helpful because it's interactive. There
are helpful people addressing specific concerns, and responding to
feedback like "I have no idea what you said," clarifying what I need to
know as best as possible. It's a distillation process, and I'm
learning.

Thanks.
Jerry

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

When a program is quit, its swap file space is no longer needed, yet
there may be fragments of many other programs sharing a particular swap
file, so it may take a long time for a particular swap file to become
completely unused, when the system will delete it.
OK, I think I managed to explain swap files already.
Untangling happens when you log out - all your programs will quit at
once and swap files will magically evaporate, because when all your
programs will quit at once, complete swap files will become unused. The
swap files will be replaced by clean fresh ones when next you log in
and start lots of programs up again and overfill your memory.

One little thing though. I don't remember if it was in 10.3 or already in
10.2, but it seems that the system became really bad at releasing swap files.
It looks like even if you quit all apps, MacOS X doesn't release the swap
files anymore. I'm not even sure logging out is sufficient: It seems that
only a good restart forces the System to delete the swap files.

Corentin

 

[Elliott Roper]

One little thing though. I don't remember if it was in 10.3 or already in
10.2, but it seems that the system became really bad at releasing swap files.
It looks like even if you quit all apps, MacOS X doesn't release the swap
files anymore. I'm not even sure logging out is sufficient: It seems that
only a good restart forces the System to delete the swap files.

That was worth a simple test. You are right. I had 1GB of swap in 5
files after a few days without logging off (768MB 12" iBook) Logging
out recovered the biggy, leaving me with 512MB in four files.
Rebooting of course, dropped it to one 64MB file, but it did not stay
that way too long. It was soon back to four files and 512MB.

 

[matt neuburg]

That was worth a simple test. You are right. I had 1GB of swap in 5
files after a few days without logging off (768MB 12" iBook) Logging
out recovered the biggy, leaving me with 512MB in four files.
Rebooting of course, dropped it to one 64MB file, but it did not stay
that way too long. It was soon back to four files and 512MB.

Yes, that's right. This was one of the reasons I wrote MemoryStick - to
find this out. I have occasionally seen 5 swapfiles drop to 4, but I
have *never* seen them drop all the way to 1 (the condition at startup
on my machine), and logging out has no effect - the only way to reset
the number of swapfiles is to restart the machine. This observation is
documented in the Help for MemoryStick.

The system never "became really bad at releasing swapfiles". It never
released swapfiles in the first place. I wrote MemoryStick when Mac OS X
first came out and this behavior dates all the way back to then, I
assure.

One interesting change, though, is that up thru Jaguar all swapfiles
were the same size (80MB IIRC) but in Panther they get successively
larger and larger as more and more of them are generated. m.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Forgot to say earlier--thanks to all of you for the OS X tutorial. Messages
saved for detailed study.

Daiya

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

That was worth a simple test. You are right. I had 1GB of swap in 5
files after a few days without logging off (768MB 12" iBook) Logging
out recovered the biggy, leaving me with 512MB in four files.
Rebooting of course, dropped it to one 64MB file, but it did not stay
that way too long. It was soon back to four files and 512MB.

Time to buy some more RAM? I only ever have one swap file, 64 MB. (2.5 GB
RAM)

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Time to buy some more RAM? I only ever have one swap file, 64 MB. (2.5 GB
RAM)

You are right Paul. My preferred method of doing so is to put 4 GB of
RAM on stands and assemble a Powerboko G5 around it. ;-) Damn 12" PB G4
has only one slot plus 256MB soldered on. At the time, 1GB sticks were
outrageously expensive, and now it's too old to spend lots of loot on.

I don't see much slowdown with 768MB total. The original poster has
512MB on a dual (slowish) processor G4, which is a bit marginal.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

The system never "became really bad at releasing swapfiles". It never
released swapfiles in the first place. I wrote MemoryStick when Mac OS X
first came out and this behavior dates all the way back to then, I
assure.

Well at least on my Mac (and I know a few people who reported this too),
when an application induces the generation of a bunch of swap files, the
system tends not to release them even after you quit the app. It didn't
do that in the earlier releases of MacOS X. I call that "becoming bad at
releasing swapfiles" ;-)) Logging out doesn't really help for this
either :-\

Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Time to buy some more RAM? I only ever have one swap file, 64 MB. (2.5 GB
RAM)

2GB RAM and sometimes up tpo 10GB of swap files (some of the apps I use
have memory leaks :-( but the files are barely ever used so performances
remain OK ).

Corentin