Talk:Enhancing Performance Of Mac OS X
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Pageouts
What would everyone say is a good number for the number of pageouts before you need more RAM? I said 3,500 but that was completely off the top of my head. --Mechcozmo 21:15, 26 November 2005 (EST)
- Personally, I would say that any pageouts that would cause a significant slowdown in application performance, be it using Exposé, dashboard, or simple multitasking would be a sign to boost your memory a little bit. For rendering type applications, any hard drive performance that doesn't involve writing relevant data to disk, like rendering a movie, you should upgrade, since any time the system needs to write memory to hard drive, you significantly lower your system bandwidth by orders of magnitude, and you won't be able to keep your CPUs onboard cache filled up. This just wastes clock cycles. All in all, I wouldn't say it is something that can just be measured since it can vary from application to application.
- Multitasking may be able to sustain multiple writes to hard disk to an extent.
- 3D or video rendering, I wouldn't accept any hard drive write to virtual memory to a certain degree. -Enygma
- OS X will pageout whenever it feels that an application has not used some RAM for a while and the system could use more Free RAM. Pageouts are a part of life. Even with 16GB of RAM, you will see a few pageouts after long term usage because OS X is clearing up memory leaks and stuff. And next time, use the correct way to indent a response, please. (Hint: colons) Readability reasons.
Fragmentation http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668
Fragmentation
Since MAC OS X 10.3 fragmentation isn't really an issue because the filesystem resolves fragmentation on the fly. - 9mmCensor
- Not quite on the fly, and not quite the filesystem. OS X does the defragging, whereas HFS+ doesn't. HFS+ has been around for years... OS 8.1--Mechcozmo 12:28, 29 December 2005 (EST)
Themes
I've found that using FruitMenu and ShapeShifter to use a plain theme (no transparency, no shadows, no menu fade effects, etc) really speeds things up.
RAID primary boot array
I am responding to a statement in the "Disc related performance tuning" section: "It is not suggested to run RAID 0 as a primary boot array because you effectively double your chances of data loss due to hard drive failure." I would very much like for my startup volume to be a RAID array, but this Apple document on "How to Use Apple-Supplied RAID Software" says it is not possible for a software RAID volume to be a startup volume. Has something changed with later versions of Mac OS X? - Aaron Antrim, 22 Sep 2006 12:28pm PST
3,500 or 35,000?
I was reading this article and I found this:
"The second number is the number of pageouts, or number of times that the computer has had to use the internal hard drive as virtual memory. If this number is very high, above 3,500, then you probably could use more RAM."
I looked up my iMac G5's pageouts, and it was 18,000! Now, yes, I only have 512 MB RAM, but it doesn't seem that slow! Should this be 35,000 instead? --IMacZealot 00:56, 26 March 2007 (EDT)
