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From: hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Josh Hodas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: What Would I Do With 20 Megs of RAM in a SE/30?
Keywords: 4 Meg SIMMS, SE/30
Message-ID: <18355@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 89 13:49:30 GMT
References: <634@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <9365@hoptoad.uucp>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Josh Hodas)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 75

In article <9365@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>In article <634@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> eberard@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard)
>writes:
>>My question is this: What can I do with 20 megabytes of RAM that I
>>could not do with 8 megabytes of RAM, which would justify the extra
>>$3000?
>
>I don't think you can justofy the price unless you have some specific
>RAM-intensive application in mind.  However, that doesn't mean that
>you couldn't get a lot of value out of it.
>
>>	- I love Multifinder, and it is not unusual for me to have 3
>>	  or 4 applications open at once, and to transfer information
>>	  (e.g., graphics and text) among them.
>
>You could run each of them in a very large partition, allowing a huge
>number of open files and very large sizes for the open files.
...
>If I had twenty main megs to play with, I'd set all my applications to
>run in 3 megs and allocate a five-megabyte cache.  The large cache
>would mean that probably every file you touched during a boot session
>would remain in memory until the machine was restarted.  (Not quite,
>but close to it.) This should have a rather noticeable effect on speed,
>particularly if you are doing development work on medium or large sized
>software projects; all your source and all your tools should stay in
>cache constantly.  And the large heaps for the applications should also
>minimize the time spent shuffling the heap around, and keep resources
>from being purged.
...
>-- 
>Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com
>
>FROM THE FOOL FILE:
>"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they
> be considered patriots.  This is one nation under God."
>    -- George Bush in FREE INQUIRY magazine, Fall 1988


Sorry Tim, I think you misunderstand a basic limitation of pre-7.0 mac OS.
They recognize only up to 8 megs of RAM. Thus the only current use for
such extra RAM is for RAM-disk or under A/UX. 


This will change soon, both do to 7.0 as well as (hopefully sooner than
7.0) some software currently in the works by a third party. (I cant say
more but will as soon as I'm allowed).


Josh


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-------------------------

Josh Hodas    (hodas@eniac.seas.upenn.edu)
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