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New Memory ceiling blues: a vision
When early in the present century I made the switch to OS X (I recently had to fire up the ol’ Molar Mac, which still runs 9.2, in order to run a translation utility on some legacy files, and marveled: how had I ever put up with that environment?), I was gratified by the rock-solid stability of the thing as compared to what I had been accustomed to: Auld Paint, my blue&white G3 production machine at FCT&D, would get the vapors a couple of times a week, and crash hard. X, by contrast, was a rock. But of course, the OS has bloated up, and the application software has got greedier, and my twin 2008 iMacs here and at work routinely run up against the niggardly 4GB ceiling engineered into them. The home machine, in particular, will slow to a crawl, no, to a creep, a few times a month, thrashing the virtual memory so hard that three minutes are required, once “Force Quit” is summoned forth from the keyboard, for an unresponsive dialog box to appear on screen, at which point it’s hard-reset city.

In home computing as in love: that rapturous, passionate, magical, sunburst love, with swallows darting behind the stained windows and that radiant shiver* giving way, as the cruft accumulates on the machine’s virtual environment, to torpor, neglect, indifference (YMMV—mine has, now and again) and, finally, the roving eye. This machine doesn’t know it, but I’m looking for a new, or at least a newer girlfriend. I’m eying a late model cheesegrater, a girl who won’t mind joining her life to my family of teenage peripherals, and who can, ah, form a connection, or rather several connections, to them. A girl who’s stacked—stacked with, say, 32GB of RAM. A girl who speaks recent iterations of the Mac OS. A girl who can accommodate several useful components presently installed in an ancient cheesegrater (topped out at OS X “Lion”) in my possession, including a nice 30" display. True, the display is not a “retina” jobbie, but that’s not a dealbreaker.

I rather think that, since BDS** won’t be giving me a gold watch at the end of next month, something like this will be my retirement present to myself. Of course, one day I will likely be complaining about the 64GB ceiling that architecture carries with it. And I suppose, given the compatibility chasm that has opened between Adobe CS5 and the recent Mac OS environments, I will, with vast reluctance, sign on to Adobe’s fucking “Creative Cloud.” Sigh.

cordially,

*that description is lightly paraphrased from a line in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada.

**At the end of this month we are at last receiving a new boss here, replacing the guy who was disgraced and fired this past year. A colleague who writes for the house organ knows the guy, and says that she’s certain he and I would not have a happy working relationship. I had not anticipated any regrets or second thoughts about pulling the trigger, but it’s pleasant to have yet another reason to get the hell out of Dodge.
New Re: Memory ceiling blues: a vision
On the CC thing: I feel ya, brother.

On the one hand, fuck subscriptions. On the other - well, I pay ~£8/mo and I get the latest version of LR and PS. PS to buy is £600+. LR is £150ish. Upgrades are very much not free. So, for me, it's a choice of "take the sub and get the software I wouldn't buy otherwise" or "live with LR alone, which is absolutely excellent until it's not". PS, of course, can do everything. And if it can't, there's a plugin or action that can.

Memory? Oh, how Apple has fucked its people. Microsoft, for all its myriad and significant sins, has done something quite remarkable with iterations of Windows >=8 - each new version seems to require fewer resources than its predecessor. Just reading this nonsense on a Mac with 4GB RAM would be part of a painful and annoying experience, whereas a Windows 10 machine with 4GB RAM is generously specced for light duties, especially if the OS is installed on an SSD.

I mourn the Apple of old, with products like the cheesegrater and the beautiful yet practical design embodied therein; now it's all soldered RAM and soldered SSD (but not by default! in 2017, Apple will sell you an iMac for one thousand of Her Imperial Majesty's Pounds Sterling that comes with a 5400RPM hard disk, presumably left over from 1997 or something) and shitty laptop GPUs in £3K desktops, all in a mad pseudoreligious quest for thinness that just doesn't matter.

I really did love my old aluminium iMac - it looked good and felt good to use - but it went wrong in numerous ways*, and not one of these was realistically fixable by my good self (yay AppleCare), because Apple designed (and continue to design) the fucking thing so that you go into it from the fucking front, via two hundred thousand square millimetres of thin glass, because fucking reasons.

*Optical drive - failed, GPU - failed, LCD panel - went blotchy
New There are still some things they do very well.
I needed to scan some documents with a Lide 210 scanner. With Preview on the Mac I can get a decent scan to PDF and have a file that is about 0.5 MB with no problems that is legible. With Win10 the default driver is incredibly crippled so I either end up with a 10+ MB file or I end up with something totally illegible. I ended up buying a copy of VueScan to do scanning on Win10.

:-/

The MacMini is (or at last was - I haven't checked recently) a great little machine if one doesn't have to do heavy graphics stuff, and really there's no reason why one couldn't plug in some external graphics module via Thunderbolt (or whatever) - it doesn't all have to be inside the little box. But who knows if Apple has any interest in keeping it a usable computing platform.

:-/

Agreed that it's senseless to make the iMac such a closed system. They could easily have a panel on the back to replace RAM, HDs, and optical drives. If they want them to be disposable then they really should have them on a "subscription" plan the way so many of the SW houses do. It would even out their income from the platform, too.

But, as you have pointed out, since they make so much money on the iPhone and its environment, its hard to see them ever investing much in the Mac again. It seems very short sighted (people aren't going to be writing iPhone apps on their phones - not without some sort of keyboard/mouse/monitor interface anyway - and servers aren't going away (and are in fact becoming ever more important - they're just getting smaller), so they shouldn't let the Mac whither the way they have...

Cheers,
Scott.
New Went ahead and did it
Hope I won’t regret the purchase: used 2012 12-core cheesegrater with 64GB RAM, 2TB HD, NVIDIA GT120 512MB video card, to be delivered in about ten days. I may demote the HD and swap in an SSD for the boot/system disk. I’ll cannibalize such components as I can from the 2007 grater (mainly the 30" inch monitor—not a “Retina” display, but probably adequate for these tired old eyes), and retain the use of most of my old peripherals. Anticipate a certain amount of trauma and expense in recreating my operating environment, but this will have fewer demands on it once the employer and I finalize our divorce at the end of next month. Wish me luck.

cordially,
New As requested:
Good luck!
--
Christian R. Conrad
Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi

(Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.)
New Do the SSD thing
OS X is slow as shit on rotating rust.
New Inclined to that
The greater limiting factor is, I think, RAM: 16x my existing gigabytage ought, I think, cut down on the frequency with which the OS frantically swaps pages back and forth as, sorcerer’s apprentice fashion, it attempts to satisfy the requirements of contending applications (particularly the notoriously leaky Safari). Nevertheless, since I’m hoping the new/old machine will see me through the remainder of my seventh decade, I might as well grease the skids performance-wise with a speedy SSD, even though I’m no longer relying on the platform for my livelihood.

cordially,
New You have too little time left to waste
Those precious final moments go by way too fast. Don't waste them waiting for any swap to spinning disk. Get the SSD, well worth it.
New I've got 16 GB in this i7 MBP 13 on Sierra.
It rarely uses more than 8 GB of RAM. Dunno what the OS is doing, but I wouldn't count on it using all the RAM the way you might want.

(I've got Chrome running with 44 tabs, 6.6 GB Used, 850 MB Swap. I almost never reboot. Why it's using Swap when there's RAM available is a mystery to me.)

Remember how much of a difference your previous SSD upgrade made?

I've been happy with this 850 EVO. Speedy and reliable and pretty cheap these days.

Do it. You'll be glad you did. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.
New Diversion: Swap isn't just paged RAM
See also: why you should never turn the pagefile off on Windows

OS X, like Windows, is demand-paged (IIRC that's how the whole copy-on-write thing works) which means everything is paged. Turning off swap just increases the likelihood of random crashes even if you don't think you exceed the physical memory.

This is a Windows-related post, but I suspect the broad principles (if not the specific technical details) apply:

Here is why eliminating the pagefile is a bad idea - with no possible mitigating circumstances that I can see.

There are essentially three categories of stuff that Windows tries to keep in RAM:

Category 1 isn't a matter of "tries to." It has to be kept in RAM at all times. This has names like "nonpaged pool" and "nonpageable OS and driver code".

Category 2 is what Windows calls "committed", or in some displays "private commit" or "private bytes." It is "backed by" the pagefile, which is to say that if all of it can't be kept in RAM at one time, the remainder will be written to the pagefile until it's needed again. The longest-ago-referenced stuff gets written out there first.

Incidentally, even if that happens, it also stays in RAM and can be accessed without reading from the pagefile, as long as no other process needs the RAM. This is thanks to what is called the "standby page list," which is a system-wide cache of such pages.

Now, I know, you're going to say "but when I leave my browser with 145 tabs open overnight, the next morning there's a delay as it's all paged back in!" Well assuming that that page-in is really what's happening, that is not a gratuitous act by Windows. No, something else needed that RAM or it wouldn't have been paged out and then assigned to something else.

But that isn't the main reason that eliminating your pagefile is stupid.

Category 3 is pageable, similar to category 2, but it is backed by "mapped files" rather than by the pagefile. Category 3 includes the code from every .exe you're running, the code from every .dll (and other dll-like things, like scr's and cpl's and so on) used by all those .exe's, the data from every file opened explicitly for mapped file access, the data from every file opened for ordinary read/write access without bypassing the file cache (which means just about every data file), and in Vista and later, all the files being Superfetch'd too. All that stuff is backed by whatever files it came from in the first place.

Now, here's the issue...

I TELL YOU THREE TIMES I TELL YOU THREE TIMES I TELL YOU THREE TIMES: Getting rid of the pagefile does not eliminate paging to and from disk!!!

Getting rid of the pagefile only eliminates paging to and from disk for category 2. It doesn't do a thing for category 3!

In fact, eliminating your pagefile will require category 3 to be paged more, to make up for the fact that every last byte of category 2 has to be kept in RAM at all times.

(Unless, of course, you have so much RAM that all of categories 1, 2, and 3 can be kept in RAM at all times. You almost certainly don't. To see if you do, check the "Virtual bytes" Performance counter for the Process object, "_Total" instance. And keep in mind that even that isn't all of the system's virtual memory needs. And then consider that if you do have that much RAM, getting rid of your pagefile won't affect things a damn bit. Because, ah, if you have that much RAM, nothing is going to be paged out to the paging file and then its memory used by some other process anyway.)

So... all you are doing by eliminating the pagefile is getting rid of one out of dozens, maybe hundreds, of files that are, in essence, used as pagefiles. Repeat: one out of dozens, at best. You really think that will matter?

Worse: Not only does eliminating your pagefile not eliminate paging to disk... It also forces Windows to make worse decisions as to what to page to disk, then it otherwise would. With no pagefile, ancient old private commit data that your programs may never want to touch again will have to be kept in RAM forever... forcing more recently-touched stuff in category 3 to be paged.

Let me say that again: you may be forcing Windows to page out mapped file contents that you touched recently, because you're insisting on keeping in RAM stuff that you touched a long time ago.

I'm afraid I cannot envision a scenario where this is anything but a stupid idea.

Well... other than those cases where it isn't even stupid.

(And MarkR's suggestion of making the pagefile just big enough so that your commit limit is equal to your worst case commit charge, means that when your commit charge hits the worst case, none of Category 3 can be in RAM at all. Again: I just don't know what he was thinking.)


It's an interesting thread. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=21013929



Ars Technica's forums are excellent for technical stuff (and their political side is OK, too; very carefully, transparently, and fairly moderated, in my view).

It's one of the few places on the internet where you'll get this kind of awesome smackdown:


That said, and this is a question...that Lightening connector should suffer the same usability issues, but no one complains about compromised system performance due to the cable. Are you arguing that Samsung may have ditched it to achieve better performance above what they and their competitors are currently offering?
Apple charges at something stupid slow like 0.6C and only supports USB 2.0 data. Samsung is supporting much faster charging, HD video output, dual USB data, and ethernet, simultaneously.
I'm trying to understand how your assumptions here are any more of a leap of faith than mine.

Well, only one of us leads battery charging development for Qualcomm, sits on the USB-IF Type-C working group and is listed as an author on that spec. :p

New I have vague recollections of such discussions.
Thanks. I'd mostly purged that part of my quasi-long-term memory. ;-)

There were good historical reasons for such things when RAM was dear, but I'm sure different optimization choices would be considered if one were starting over now...

As long as the OS still wants to write things to disk for its own use even when free RAM is available, then there can be substantial benefits in replacing a spinning platter with a SSD. And having reboots take a few tens of seconds rather than minutes is a big win, also too.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Re: I have vague recollections of such discussions.
SSDs add most value when accessing numerous small files, due to their (nearasfuckit) instantaneous seek time.

Funnily enough, your OS is made of numerous small files.
New Gracias.. on your timing too.
About to install a OWC 480 GB *SSD in the early '09 24" iMac
* Cthulhu! we're bloody-spoiled! with RAM cheaper than rain-water in Texas.

Thence pop existing 650 G unit into slim box: and Viola: a place
A) to store data I don't really want to save
B) for LISP evaluation {IIRC that LRPD.}

Your quoted essay likely a prod go back, later to Source for some other gems; 'course you drop the other shoe (separately as fits the Importance of the factoid?)
that Indeed the OS does live by taking jillions of those little (damn-near packets?)

So thanx again for yet another Synchronicity eggzample.

A query, if it strikes your fancy:
I gather that ... in the unending aim to counter the growing Apple greed-Quotient, there's a year-build Number (for iMacs? for notebooks??)
beyond which one's efforts to use tools + brain to repair, will run into their Soldered-in-$$$Wall.

IS that year 2012 as for cheesy-graters (I surmised) and maybe iMacs?
How Many of Us do indeed DESPISE this entirely AD-vertainment feature of SCREENS
no thicker than your nearest mucous membrane?




(And I Know: Nobody knoze if ANY Apple-Suit ..yet? gives a flying-fuck) ...
just How Many of Us already infect ...
their Base == Eloi Tribe of willing/fawning Patsys.
New the “Activity Monitor” app...
frequently shows the 4GB of physical RAM redlined on my elderly twin production units. I don’t anticipate making major demands on memory in retirement, but I’m hoping that between the vast increase in gigabytage and the SSD I will be seeing less of the SBOD.

cordially,
New as to going solid state
Assuming price not to be a consideration (actually, of course, it will be to some extent), would one prefer a vanilla SATA unit, or a card-based PCIe jobbie (at perhaps half the gigabytage) as the boot device? Asking for a friend.

cordially,
New I assume you want an SATA-interface.
Whatever your Cheese Grater uses (almost certainly SATA) would be the simplest.

Check EveryMac for the details.

Good luck!

Cheers,
Scott.
     Memory ceiling blues: a vision - (rcareaga) - (15)
         Re: Memory ceiling blues: a vision - (pwhysall) - (1)
             There are still some things they do very well. - (Another Scott)
         Went ahead and did it - (rcareaga) - (12)
             As requested: - (CRConrad)
             Do the SSD thing - (pwhysall) - (10)
                 Inclined to that - (rcareaga) - (9)
                     You have too little time left to waste - (crazy)
                     I've got 16 GB in this i7 MBP 13 on Sierra. - (Another Scott) - (5)
                         Diversion: Swap isn't just paged RAM - (pwhysall) - (3)
                             I have vague recollections of such discussions. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                 Re: I have vague recollections of such discussions. - (pwhysall)
                             Gracias.. on your timing too. - (Ashton)
                         the “Activity Monitor” app... - (rcareaga)
                     as to going solid state - (rcareaga) - (1)
                         I assume you want an SATA-interface. - (Another Scott)

Between our quests we sequin vests and impersonate Clark Gable.
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