Leopard memory usage and management

[iansilv]

I recently started using mac osx, and I was wondering if Leopard, with its 64bit capabilities, makes use of huge amounts of ram- like 32gb in the mac pros. I have a macbook pro and am considering upgrading to 4gb, but I wanted to know how Leopard deals with extra memory. doe sit load more of itself in to memory? Will more memory make coverflow work faster? If Leopard has a huge amount of memory to work with- 32gb for example, will it fundamentally change the way it operates relating to the hard disk or does it only use what is needed by applications as they open?

[Amdahl]

OS X works about the same as any other OS. If you want it to pre-load something, and you had 32GB of RAM, you could put a few commands in the bootup scripts to read the files you wanted in to cache.

[iansilv]

So disk caching won't be reduced, overall snappiness will not increase with 32gb of ram?

[CRAZYBUBBA]

Leopard on 32 bit for me has never used all my memory.