Ah, I see what's happening (was quadra system bloat)

[Scott Raney]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002 <martin at atwork.bdx.co.uk> wrote:

> I've concluded that what's happening on the quadra, and I think the
> screenshot clearly shows this, is that revolution isn't using its own
> application memory partition for documents and data and instead is loading
> them into the operating system's memory partition, at any rate that's how
> it appears to the mac Finder.
> Surely it's not intended to work like that is it ?

Actually it is, as are most other modern apps including all WWW
browsers and most "office" type packages: The MacOS "partition"
architecture is just fundamentally incompatible with the way
applications that can open different sized documents work.  This is
just naturally the way applications on all other OSs (including Mac OS
X) work too.

> It just blithely fills up the system's ram with its stacks and whatever
> until there's no more system ram space left and the mac crashes of course.

As opposed to the way other older apps work, which is to just more
quickly fill up their own partitions and then crash the system ;-)

> Possibly, the fact that at the same time there is an unused 17 megs or so
> free within rev's application memory partition results in some internal
> confusion about whether new ram space can be safely granted to the app, I
> don't know, I'm only guessing needless to say.

No, the app's partition is only used for a few small things that MacOS
still requires be allocated there (QT stuff mostly at this point).
This means that increasing the engine's partition size is usually
counterproductive because it will actually *decrease* the amount of
memory available to it.  The only exception would be some QT-intensive
apps where increasing the partition a bit may improve performance and
increase the number of movies you can play at one time.

There is a way to get the fixed-partition behavior, though, and that
is just to change the two bytes in the TMEM resource to 0s.  You
should never do this for the development environment, though, and the
only good reason for doing it at all would be if your app needs to run
on systems with ill-behaved apps that also use system memory,
RamDoubler being the most notable example.

> Do 68k standalones work like this too?

Yes, again unless you change the TMEM resources.
  Regards,
    Scott

> martin baxter
> 
> m a r t i n
> 
> martin baxter Cambridge UK

-- 
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Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...