Wired running SGI Article

[Zane H. Healy]

>On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>>BTW, I really wish Mac OS X or Linux were half as "smooth" as Irix! 
>>I've gotten a "beachball" twice on my dual 2Ghz G5 while typing 
>>this email thanks to what I have running in the background.
>
>Whaddaya, like, running crypto for the NSA?  Global weather 
>prognosis in real-time?  What on earth could keep a G5 that busy???
>
>   Enquiring minds...

Downloading and exporting a very large Map image using a Java-based 
viewing application.  I'm also running Eudora, Safari, Firefox, and 
Adobe Photoshop CS.

Most of my load problems seem to be largely due to the really sucky 
Virtual Memory implementation in Mac OS X.  Someone mind telling me 
why on earth with 1.5GB RAM I'm using 4GB of VM just by logging in? 
Earlier today my VM usage was up over 10GB!  I think the "beachball" 
can almost always, if not always, be blamed on something swapping in 
or out of memory.

Having said that, I don't have much trouble running my G5 at 100% 
load on both CPU's.  I have several very CPU intensive apps that I 
use that make very efficient use of the Dual Processors.

		Zane


-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |