Intel Mac Mini SLOOOOOOOW...

[milo]

What contradiction?

Of course Rosetta is "different," but that's not the point. The point is, I can really load up a Mac with half the RAM and about 20% of the horsepower of a Core Solo Mini, and it doesn't perform unacceptably as a rule. And if it does get laggy, a restart works wonders.

And that mac with half the ram is running a different processor, different build of the os, different builds of any native apps (which consistently use less ram on PPC than on intel), not running rosetta and not losing some of the ram to the graphics chip.

I'm not sure what makes you think ram use should be comparable between the two machines?

 

[IJ Reilly]

A reboot can reset many things that may have peformance implications:

I can grant you all of this, but note that apparently neither of us has the technical background required to explain precisely how OSX handles virtual memory swapfiles. I know only from my long experience, and from what I've read, that swapfiles proliferate, that they eat up drive space (itself, a potential performance issue), and that they tend to degrade system responsiveness over time. I also know that they are not dynamic, in the sense that they don't get deleted without a system reboot. This has been a frequent topic of discussion for years now. You could look it up.

 

[IJ Reilly]

And that mac with half the ram is running a different processor, different build of the os, different builds of any native apps (which consistently use less ram on PPC than on intel), not running rosetta and not losing some of the ram to the graphics chip.

I'm not sure what makes you think ram use should be comparable between the two machines?

Yes, a much, much slower machine with far less RAM running the same OS. These kinds of things get compared all the time, other variables be damned, and I think it's not unreasonable to expect that a machine with probably five times as much horsepower and twice the quantity of RAM would at least equal the performance of a four year old, far slower Mac under normal circumstances, and even a lot of abnormal ones.

But this horse is dead. It's beyond dead, it's drawing flies. I don't know what could be accomplished by continuing.

 

[steelfist]

for me, ram will always help. however, the problem he is reporting shows not only hardware problem, (not enough ram) but also the software problem as well.

the problem is clearly severe enough to assume that the software is kinda messed up.

i would advise a archive and install.

 

[milo]

Yes, a much, much slower machine with far less RAM running the same OS. These kinds of things get compared all the time, other variables be damned, and I think it's not unreasonable to expect that a machine with probably five times as much horsepower and twice the quantity of RAM would at least equal the performance of a four year old, far slower Mac under normal circumstances, and even a lot of abnormal ones.

It's a machine that REQUIRES far less ram.

Horsepower and speed don't matter if the machine is starved for ram and is swapping data from the hard drive constantly. When you exceed the ram in a machine, it will slow to a crawl. This is true of any machine, even a G5 quad will do it if the things you have open exceed the ram.

The intel machines just require much more ram and as a result reach that ram saturation point far easier than any of the PPC machines do. Horsepower has nothing to do with the equation. A faster processor isn't going to speed up the transfer of swap data to and from a relatively slow hard drive.

I'm not sure why you're having such a tough time understanding this.

Maybe you shouldn't worry so much about what's "unreasonable to expect" and focus more on what IS. So you feel that requiring more than 512 megs of ram to run well isn't reasonable. That's your opinion. But it's not a reason for you to be in denial about the fact that more ram is needed.


There are macs from years ago that ran fine on FOUR megs of ram. Would you expect a new mac to be able to do that, just because newer processors are vastly more powerful?

 

[milo]

for me, ram will always help. however, the problem he is reporting shows not only hardware problem, (not enough ram) but also the software problem as well.

the problem is clearly severe enough to assume that the software is kinda messed up.

i would advise a archive and install.

I disagree. The problems described have been seen many times on intel minis with normal software installs. And those problems have completely gone away simply by expanding the ram. I know, it's hard for someone with only PPC experience to believe, but it is the case.

 

[dr_lha]

Yes, a much, much slower machine with far less RAM running the same OS. These kinds of things get compared all the time, other variables be damned...

"Other variables" like CPU architecture for example? The fact is that PPC code is very different from Intel code, so you're not really comparing like with like here at all.

 

[iSee]

From someone who was in exactly the same situation:

YOU NEED MORE RAM

Don't listen to people speculating about other solutions. Sorry, guys, but you don't know what you are talking about. I don't know exactly why intel macs require so much RAM, but they do (probably Rosetta). Word in particular has that big pause when switching to a document Window.

Get more RAM --> pauses go away

 

[gnasher729]

From someone who was in exactly the same situation:

YOU NEED MORE RAM

Don't listen to people speculating about other solutions. Sorry, guys, but you don't know what you are talking about. I don't know exactly why intel macs require so much RAM, but they do (probably Rosetta). Word in particular has that big pause when switching to a document Window.

Get more RAM --> pauses go away

Remember that he posted two numbers from Activity Monitor: Three million pages swapped in, and one million pages swapped out. That is an absolute, one hundred percent indication of not enough RAM. Now people can discuss why the RAM is not enough as long as they like, but the fact won't go away: The Macintosh decided three million times that some data that should have been in RAM wasn't there because there wasn't enough RAM, so it had to be read from the harddisk, and one million times some data that was in RAM and had to be moved out to make space for other stuff was modified and needed to be written to the harddisk. Four million read and write operations will bring any computer to its knees, and more RAM will fix it.