system bloat problem with rev on 68K mac

Ken Norris (dialup) pixelbird at interisland.net
Mon Mar 18 13:33:00 EST 2002


on 3/18/02 5:10 AM, Martin Baxter at martin at atwork.bdx.co.uk wrote:
 
> The Quadra 630 has 1 72pin simm slot which can take a single 32 mb simm.
> Additionally 4 megs of ram is soldered to the motherboard, making a
> possible 36megs of physical ram. The extra 4 megs in my case is virtual
> memory.
----------
Right. But you said _40 megs_ in the previous post which is incorrect, not
36, which is correct if you include the motherboard memory. This is what I
meant. 4 megs could make a big difference if you're maxed out. A person can
hope, though. BTW, do you know if there's any way to replace the SIMM with a
piggybacked board with more memory? So far, it looks like one must replace
the motherboard to gain more memory capability.
----------
> It would be so much better for
> people like us if the documentation could stand separately from the
> development environment
----------
Go to the Rev website and DL Geoff Canyon's _revrtfer.rev_ stack. It has all
the docs in 3 different text types. You can open it separately, without
Rev's UI. I've requested Geoff to make it into a standalone, but it works
fine with just the basic MC engine running.
----------
> I find that having it internal to the
> application
----------
I know what you're saying, but, again, remember it's a stack. It's tied to
Rev's UI (runtime), which sort of makes it internal, but the MC engine is
what actually runs it, just like the rest of the UI.
----------
> is just extra clutter in a crowded development environment.
----------
I agree, but then you couldn't use it's features, like the hilited keywords,
which automatically bring up other info elsewhere in the docs. I'm OK with
90% of that myself. I can develop my own search stuff pretty quickly.
----------
> 
>> 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,
> 
> That's very interesting. Have you looked at the "About this computer"
> dialog in the Finder to see what's happening? This sounds like exactly
> what's happening here, but since you have more VM allocated, it just takes
> longer for the system to fill it all up and choke.
----------
No. With 128 mb Virtual RAM it hasn't choked, it's just slow, i.e., it takes
the drive much, much longer to open things than actual RAM. The computer
will open what it can with the available Real RAM; when that fills up, it
has to switch in the Virtual RAM (which uses the HD). Everything bogs down a
lot (especially in my PB beacause the processer does extra stuff), depending
on which part of the UI is loading, but, if you're patient, it _will_
eventually continue.
----------
> Normally the memory used by the system fluctuates, which is why you have to
> leave it some free ram to work in. In "About this computer" you can
> normally watch it's memory usage going up and down as you do things.
> 
> When you are running revolution however, you can only watch the system's
> memory usage going up, and up, and up, and up until it has used up all the
> available space. meanwhile, revolution's application memory can be almost
> empty or unused.
----------
I might be wrong, but I believe that's because Rev's entire UI is
_stack-based_. The MC engine grabs _blocks_ of memory it needs to run the
show according to the amount of memory the Rev UI needs. In other words, the
engine by itself may not use much more memory, but accessing the Rev UI
does. The stack list for Rev's UI is _huge_ and requires a lot of memory to
operate it all. You'll use up 32 megs quickly, and the system will crash.
----------
> Interested parties might want to see
> <http://www.harbourtown.co.uk/temp/before_after.html> where I have posted
> screenshots of the "About this computer" dialog before launching revolution
> on the quadra and after it has choked because the system ran out of ram.
----------
That just proves my point. You cannot use the REV UI on a stock Quadra 630.
If I use mine for Rev stuff, it'll be because I have hot-rodded the machine,
or to just run the engine and Geoff's revrtfer.rev stack for reference only.

Best regards,
Ken N.

 




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