Hi guys, I have a PB 15" 1.67 G4 with 1.5GB of RAM. Anyway, I normally have the following apps running... 1. Firefox with around 10 to 15 tabs open 2. Azureus OR BitsOnWheels 3. Mail 4. iTunes Now, I notice that after some time, everything slows down. This is very evident when browsing web pages. Even scrolling up and down seems like everything is in slow motion. I know all the apps I have running are the culprits for the system slowdown. So is there a way for me to gain my system resources without rebooting the system? Note that I still want to have these apps running though. Thanks. Allan
This is easy, dont use Firefox. I've ditched Firefox since version 1.5 came out with the ridiculous memory usage, normally 4-5 times that of Safari or Camino. You'll have to quit the apps in order for the system to remap the newly vacant memory. Note that there is a known "memory leak" in Firefox with it's link prefetching, so just quitting it won't help, the developers call it a "feature". Unless you are using a necessary extension, go with Camino.
Well, basically, to free up resources. Kill some apps. The memory will be moved from active to reserved, but not yet completely moved to free. That only happens whenever the system does periodic checks every once in a while. Reserved memory is still free, its just that the system has it available for other apps, just doesn't have to do a system call to allocate the memory. However, I don't think the problem is lack of resources, I have experienced said slow down whenever I have Firefox running with some flash animations running. Have enough of them running, which probably happens with 15 tabs and boom.. you're slowing down.
Unlike Windows, Mac apps are generally more behaved, and release memory resources upon exiting, but there are still badly-programmed apps that are still wasteful. Firefox has been a sort of a resource hog, as others have said, and this could be your problem, so let's hope the next iteration will plug the memory leak. To get resources back, just shut some apps down - you can't have your cake and eat it too. It's no bother really to just restart them when you need them. Of the apps you've mentioned, some might cause you irregular slowdowns, especially if they've been preset to access the net periodically to update themselves for new content, like Mail when it checks for new email, and iTunes when it tries to check for new material in your subscribed podcasts. Bit Torrent clients are constantly active of course, and the aforementioned Firefox will always slow things down.
