system bloat problem with rev on 68K mac

[Ken Norris (dialup)]

on 3/17/02 8:09 AM, Martin Baxter at martin at atwork.bdx.co.uk wrote:

> I have an old quadra 630 at home and I thought it would be useful to have
> revolution installed on it mainly so I could swot-up on the transcript
> dictionary when I'm at home and thinking about possible ideas.
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So do I. We should collaborate because it's my intention to do the exact
same thing onthe exact same machine (Quadra 630).
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> When I tried to run revolution on it though I found that the system's
> memory allocation just grows and grows until it has used up all the
> available ram, at which point of course everything chokes.
> The system is 7.6.1 and usually uses 5-6 megs of ram out of a total of 40
> megs (36physical and 4 virtual).
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How did you get 40 mb out of a Quadra 630? Mine maxes out at 32 mb.

5-7 megs is just the sys space. Try to run anything and it jumps up vey
quick. The Rev Dictionary will grab at least 60 mb or so, as soon as you
open the thing.
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> Has anyone come across this before? Is it perhaps some conflict peculiar to
> my system?
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Yes. Lots of conflict.

I use Rev on a PB 1400c, 48 mb, 1.2 g drive. The only way I can use Rev at
all on it is to allocate 128 mb to Virtual RAM. After a lot of frustrating
experimentation, that's what I had to do to prevent 'soft' crashes. Anything
less and sooner or later the system would hang indefinitely, requiring a
forced restart. Of course, that means it's pretty slow, and it will still
crash if I try to access any of the image libraries. I haven't even tried to
load Rev onto the Quadra, because I know what will happen.

The best solution, I think, and I may be slitting my own throat here because
we may end up competing with each other, is to go on Ebay or somewhere and
get a motherboard upgrade for the Quadra which either has, or can take, much
more memory, then max out the memory.

Without using Virtual RAM (very slow), I'm convinced you can't develop in
REV with less than 128 mb, and even with that you'll probably can't have
much else open. Remember, Rev is stack-based.

I'm looking to upgrade the Quadra to go for 256 mb memory. If the price of
doing it is too high, I'll just use it for docs access, per Geoff Canyon's
life-saving _revrtfer.rev._

Actually, my Mac IIci, which is without a doubt my favorite 'old' Mac, can
take a whopping 128 mb, probably more than any other computer of that age
(we're talking 13 years ago). It has some kind of accelerator in it now
(runs OS 7.6 just fine), but I've heard you can get up to a 60 mhz chip and
motherboard, and nuBus RasterOps daughter board with extra video memory
(which can produce millions of colors) for cheap. If I can get away with
doing all that to it, I think I'll paint the case Candy Apple Red with
flames on the sides! :). I'll have the sportiest Mac of that generation on
the island where I live (Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, WA). I could
probably run Rev on it OK.

Best regards,
Ken N.