G4 / Tiger / 6.9.2 - Memory Requirements

[AINSLIE]

I had the opportunity to update to Mac OS 10.4.2 / PT 6.9.3. I have an MDD Dual 1GHZ w/ 1GB Ram. This meets the reuirements in the Digi documents. But this more sluggish than 10.3.8 - significantly. The max ram my system can take is 2GB. I would like to jump into a G5, but until this I saw no reason other than a bit more power for soft synths but at the sacrifice of a PCI slot. I have a 4 card HD Accel system. This begs the question - is more RAM really actually gonna do a lot for me? Or are there other system tweaks that I could do - like how to turn of widgets (I would sacrifice that cool thing for some speed back ...)

Any help most appreciated

Ainslie
GD MDD 1GHZ / 1GB
HD4, PT 6.9.3cs1

[Andre Knecht]

[…] is more RAM really actually gonna do a lot for me? […]

I spent a couple of days working on my (then) new dual 2.5 G5 with only 1 Gig of RAM, while waiting for the additional 2 Gigs to arrive. After I finally installed it, the difference between the two amounts actually shocked me. The OS alone literally sprung to life. Everything else (all the things we care about ’round here) is now pretty much glitch-free, except for actual bugs.

I know it may sound crazy, but I now consider 2Gigs to be the minimum viable amount of RAM for OSX as a DAW platform.

Cheers.

[AINSLIE]

Thanks for that .. after spending a little time looking at the system activity and memory usage I decided to deactivate all widgets. I see that with just PT in a 70 track session it is using 1GB or VM. All VM used is 7GB. To run totally from RAM is impossible with the way Tiger (and Panther) is set up for VM. So the more RAM you have the better - I guess. of course I can only load 2GB on my G4. So i am seeing more reason for the G5 each day ... gosh - I can't believe how far the memory needs have skyrocketed since OS9!

Ainslie

[Rich Breen]

I had the opportunity to update to Mac OS 10.4.2 / PT 6.9.3. I have an MDD Dual 1GHZ w/ 1GB Ram. This meets the reuirements in the Digi documents. But this more sluggish than 10.3.8 - significantly. The max ram my system can take is 2GB. I would like to jump into a G5, but until this I saw no reason other than a bit more power for soft synths but at the sacrifice of a PCI slot. I have a 4 card HD Accel system. This begs the question - is more RAM really actually gonna do a lot for me? Or are there other system tweaks that I could do - like how to turn of widgets (I would sacrifice that cool thing for some speed back ...)

Hey - FWIW, I'm running an HD3 on a dual 867 w/1G Ram on Tiger, and noticed *no* slowdown from 10.3.8 to Tiger. In fact, the system is much snappier under Tiger (though ProTools remains the same). I believe that if you don't ever invoke Widgets, they won't chew up any resources (after they are invoked, they continue to occupy some RAM until the next restart even though they're inactive). Also, is it possible that Spotlight is still indexing some of your drives in the background? This will definitely slow things down. BTW, you *can* turn Spotlight off by editing your /private/etc/hostconfig file in the Terminal.

Just a few thoughts - hope they're helpful...

rich

[GTveito]

We are running 6.9.2/Tiger on G4 DP 1.25 with 2G RAM. Decided to upgrade the G4's instead of buying G5, next computer upgrade will probably be XP.