Rev Classic Crashing

[Geoff Canyon]

At 4:49 PM -0400 4/12/02, Troy Rollins wrote:
>On Friday, April 12, 2002, at 04:35 PM, JacksHyperInfo at aol.com wrote:
>
>> Rev 1.1 Mac version is crashing regularly.  What should the memory allocation
>> be for the rev. application?
>
>The editing environment is rather heavy on memory. I use about 60 megs when working in OS9.

This assumes you have enough free memory apart from the allocation to Revolution. You should always make sure to have free memory available for Revolution independent of the memory allocated to Revolution.

As a demonstration, set the allocation to the default (15,000) and run Revolution. Immediately switch to the Finder and select About This Computer on the Apple menu. You should see Revolution taking something in excess of 15,000 -- maybe 20,000 to 30,000, depending on circumstances. This is because Revolution (like many other apps on the Mac) allocates memory dynamically -- as dynamically as is possible on Mac OS 9.

Now do some work in Revolution. Open some projects. Play with some windows. Read the documentation. Do a tutorial. As you do these things, Revolution is allocating more memory to support those activities. You could see Revolution's allocation in the About This Computer dialog grow to as much as 60 or 70k, or possibly even more -- it depends on what you open and the requirements to open it.

The consequence of this is that it's critical for Revolution to have memory to allocate. If you assign too much to Revolution in the Get Info dialog, you are actually _taking memory away_ from Revolution, because it's not designed to take advantage of the extra you've assigned it, and there is less to grab dynamically.

If you run out of memory, Revolution will allocate until there is practically none left. What I see at that point is that the desktop takes forever to update. If I move a window, I'll see the desktop picture redraw bit by bit, and the icons on the desktop update individually. That's a sure sign that it's time to quit Revolution and start again. More memory in your computer prevents this.
-- 

regards,

Geoff Canyon
gcanyon at inspiredlogic.com