heya,

here's one you won't here very often. i have a mac pro with 4 gb of ram and it doesn't even use less than half.
rosetta runs four wu at once on my machine. per activity monitor each wu uses 120 mb of physical memory and 650 mb of virtual memory. i am brand new to mac so i am wondering if this is normal ? i still have 2.83 gb of free physical available. to me this seems a waste. if i'm not using the computer i would like to have close to 100 percent utilization of physical memory. on my boinc prefs i have use 90 percent of swap space and use 100 percent of memory on idle. why isn't it being utilized ? on rosetta prefs i just changed target cpu run time to one day. will this help ?
thanks for the input,
ken

Computer programs just don't work that way. But the good news is that RAM doesn't take much electricity at all to keep active. The main power draw is CPU. Because your machine has so much memory, it means you don't have to swap anything out to disk, and so that's good.

Some tasks need more memory to run then others. And they require more memory at certain points in the calculations. This is true regardless of how much memory is available on the machine.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

put a SAP wu on your PC and you will see your RAM getting filled more :p

There is really no benefit to extra RAM once you have enough to run Rosetta, your OS, and any background tasks you have running. Basically, below a certain amount of RAM you are slowing down Rosetta because your apps are swapping pages, which involves slow disk access. However, once you've gotten to the point of not needing to swap as you are now, there no longer is a performance penalty nor a performance gain. Memory bandwidth/latency and particularly processor will have a much bigger impact on speeding up Rosetta rather than memory size at this point.

Good news is, you can still benefit from all that memory if you start a memory-heavy app while BOINC is running. Also if you run other BOINC projects they can stay in physical RAM when they are not running.

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