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32 bit or 64 bit ?

S

sa3er

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 23, 2011
88
0
i have a Macbook pro (MC373LL) with i7 CPU. i installed 4 more Gig RAM on it. now i have 8 Gig RAM and snow leopard 1.6.6 (last one).
i wanna know that with 8 Gig RAM i have to use 64 bit kernel or 32bit is fine ? (now its 32bit as default)

ps:i have speed problem always because of lack of ram. i have an XP via parallels too always. please teach me everything as i'm new in mac world ... :D:apple:
 

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  • Screen shot 2011-01-23 at 3.58.46 PM.png
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can you see anything worn in screen shot ?
any suggestion ?
 
i dedicated 3 gig for vm as i always there is 10 firefox profile open on it ... ! (now 2 gig is already used there at the moment and it grow up fast)

are you sure everything is fine ? there is no green part on activity monitor ... :eek:
now i really have speed problem. my CPU is good but i think my RAM is suck
 
sa3er said:
i dedicated 3 gig for vm as i always there is 10 firefox profile open on it ... ! (now 2 gig is already used there at the moment and it grow up fast)

are you sure everything is fine ? there is no green part on activity monitor ... :eek:
now i really have speed problem. my CPU is good but i think my RAM is suck
Click to expand...

10 firefox profile = 10 Firefox (the browser) tabs or windows?

And yes, the RAM usage seems fine, please read the link I provided. Also your PAGE OUTS (RAM copied to the HDD) are quite low compared to the PAGE INS (content read from the HDD for the RAM), as I have 2.21GB PAGE OUTS and 3.84GB PAGE INS with my 4GB of RAM and having ten applications open, though currently none as hungry as your VM process.

Running the 64 bit kernel will not make a difference though, but using an SSD should, as I run my VMs from an external FW800 HDD while VMWare Fusion (the application, not the VMs) is installed onto my SSD, and the VMs open faster than before with VMWare Fusion installed onto an HDD and the VMs being on the same internal HDD.
 
I run a 32 bit version even on my Mac Pro with 14GB because the NTFS driver I have doesn't run with the 64 bit kernel, preventing me from using a NTFS USB drive or thumbdrive with it.
 
You need to tune your working sets

sa3er said:
ps:i have speed problem always because of lack of ram. i have an XP via parallels too always. please teach me everything as i'm new in mac world ... :D:apple:
Click to expand...

Your speed problem is not caused by physical memory. You might need to tune your working set parameters to allow your system bette utilization of your memory. You may try this:
1. Create a file "sysctl.conf"
2. Put the following lines in that file:

kern.sysv.shmmax=536870912
kern.sysv.shmall=131072
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=32

3. look into directory /etc if a file sysctl.conf exists, if so rename to sysctl.conf.old
4. Move or copy your new sysctl.conf file into directory /etc
(You need to use the terminal and sudo to do these last two steps)
5. Reboot your Mac.

You may need to experiment with the settings to find the best parameters for your use case. But be careful not to "overdo" things... :)

Good luck,

Manfred
 
10 firefox profile = 10 Firefox (the browser) tabs or windows?

And yes, the RAM usage seems fine, please read the link I provided. Also your PAGE OUTS (RAM copied to the HDD) are quite low compared to the PAGE INS (content read from the HDD for the RAM), as I have 2.21GB PAGE OUTS and 3.84GB PAGE INS with my 4GB of RAM and having ten applications open, though currently none as hungry as your VM process.

Running the 64 bit kernel will not make a difference though, but using an SSD should, as I run my VMs from an external FW800 HDD while VMWare Fusion (the application, not the VMs) is installed onto my SSD, and the VMs open faster than before with VMWare Fusion installed onto an HDD and the VMs being on the same internal HDD.
Click to expand...
10 window !
my USB ports are busy so i can't buy external SSD drive ... (also its not cheap)

Your speed problem is not caused by physical memory. You might need to tune your working set parameters to allow your system bette utilization of your memory. You may try this:
1. Create a file "sysctl.conf"
2. Put the following lines in that file:

kern.sysv.shmmax=536870912
kern.sysv.shmall=131072
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=32

3. look into directory /etc if a file sysctl.conf exists, if so rename to sysctl.conf.old
4. Move or copy your new sysctl.conf file into directory /etc
(You need to use the terminal and sudo to do these last two steps)
5. Reboot your Mac.

You may need to experiment with the settings to find the best parameters for your use case. But be careful not to "overdo" things...

Good luck,

Manfred
Click to expand...
dude what is this trick doing ?!
i scare if i do this my mac blow up
 
no green on graphic

I am not especially technical, but on my MBP, when I am out of green on the graph, my system crawls, in spite of the folks that say his memory is OK. I close a few apps, or if I have been running a lot of flash in safari I close it out and reopen it.

I no idea why this guy has almost half of his memory wired. I never see that. Perhaps it is characteristic of the chip? My entire system library is a little over 5GB. He has most of that loaded into RAM?

I would suggest restarting the computer with no apps open, and check the wired memory usage. If it is more than 500 MB I would suggest calling apple support. Open the programs and watch what causes that to increase to that level.
 
i have no /etc directory to do that hell trick.
well i just set 3 gig for VM. i think parallels removed 3 physical gig ... so i have only 5 gig physically !!
but with 5 gig its still weird :confused:
 
when i count apps RAM usage here its something about 4-5 gig but the bottom shows no green ! all 8 gig used ...
what the heck is that mean ???
 

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my speed now is really suck. why such a huge hardware with mac act like this ?
even my old school desktop wasn't this much slow and problemic !
 
sa3er said:
my speed now is really suck. why such a huge hardware with mac act like this ?
even my old school desktop wasn't this much slow and problemic !
Click to expand...

Your ram really isn't the issue it appears. Look at the top of your activity monitor you just posted, the CPU usage of your VM specifically. What are you doing in that VM that you need it open constantly while you use OSX? And rather than open 10 firefox windows, open 10 tabs. And try a lighter browser if you can like Chrome and see if that makes a difference.

Although, I suggest running your browser out in OSX if you can, the really seems like the most efficient way of doing it. If you really need to do that much in XP that it takes that much resource wise, why not consider bootcamp?
 
I guess someone needs to explain to you something about these number of act. montior.
In the last pic you had 1,4gigs of free physical RAM. blue and green is basically free. Blue is just cached.
You have so much wired memory because VM Memory is always wired. You could cut down on VM memory but not enough RAM is not your problem.

How many CPU cores have you assigned to parallels VM. If you only assign a maximum of half than OSX stays more speedy. Still I tried parallels too and it sucks in performance. Shut it down and I bet all your speed problems are gone.

I'd only use it if you really need it and I had the feeling windows mode worked better (than coherency) as it has an easier job scheduling resources.
It is especially stupid to use a browser in the virtual machine. Why not use FF in OSX and use the VM for what really only works well in Windows or Linux or whatever it is running.
As a rule of thumb do not use anything in a VM that needs many disk accesses. That kills performance.
 
walshlink said:
Why?
Click to expand...

I dont know where he's got 32 gb from, the commonly recognised standard is that 32 bit will support up to 4 gb.



wikipedia said:
Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory.
Click to expand...

The size of the bus determines how many jobs can be dispatched to the ram at any one time, because of the restrictions of using a 32 bit bus, the general considered limit for a 32 bit bus is 4 gb, however the is an exponential increase when using 64 bit mode (dont ask me why, i dont know) to something stupid like 16 extabytes when using a 64 bit mode.

However when looking at ram usage things can get a little confusing, as snow leopard uses openCL which uses the ram not being used on your video card to help process jobs from the processor too.
 
sim667 said:
I dont know where he's got 32 gb from, the commonly recognised standard is that 32 bit will support up to 4 gb.





The size of the bus determines how many jobs can be dispatched to the ram at any one time, because of the restrictions of using a 32 bit bus, the general considered limit for a 32 bit bus is 4 gb, however the is an exponential increase when using 64 bit mode (dont ask me why, i dont know) to something stupid like 16 extabytes when using a 64 bit mode.

However when looking at ram usage things can get a little confusing, as snow leopard uses openCL which uses the ram not being used on your video card to help process jobs from the processor too.
Click to expand...

Hellhammer was talking about the 32-bit kernel and a 64-bit CPU, as every Mac since 2007 has a 64-bit CPU inside, but still runs on a 32-bit kernel, which means that even running 64-bit applications inside Mac OS X 10.6 using the 32-bit kernel can address more than 4GB RAM, up to 32GB as it seems.
The 32-bit kernel only limits the kernel itself to usage of less than 4GB of RAM, but not the actual applications, as they run under the "launchd" process, which is 64-bit (take a look at Activity Monitor > Show All Process Hierarchically).
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Hellhammer was talking about the 32-bit kernel and a 64-bit CPU, as every Mac since 2007 has a 64-bit CPU inside, but still runs on a 32-bit kernel, which means that even running 64-bit applications inside Mac OS X 10.6 using the 32-bit kernel can address more than 4GB RAM, up to 32GB as it seems.
The 32-bit kernel only limits the kernel itself to usage of less than 4GB of RAM, but not the actual applications, as they run under the "launchd" process, which is 64-bit (take a look at Activity Monitor > Show All Process Hierarchically).
Click to expand...

Oh i see, sorry, i was talking about the kernel :eek:

Didnt know about that bit, we were just told on my snow 101 course there's no point running in running 64 bit unless you've got more than 4 gb ram...... no particular explanation as to why so i was just assuming :D
 
If you need Windows-only Apps, you may want to try CrossOver (Wine)

dusk007 said:
I guess someone needs to explain to you something about these number of act. montior.
In the last pic you had 1,4gigs of free physical RAM. blue and green is basically free. Blue is just cached.
You have so much wired memory because VM Memory is always wired. You could cut down on VM memory but not enough RAM is not your problem.

How many CPU cores have you assigned to parallels VM. If you only assign a maximum of half than OSX stays more speedy. Still I tried parallels too and it sucks in performance. Shut it down and I bet all your speed problems are gone.

I'd only use it if you really need it and I had the feeling windows mode worked better (than coherency) as it has an easier job scheduling resources.
It is especially stupid to use a browser in the virtual machine. Why not use FF in OSX and use the VM for what really only works well in Windows or Linux or whatever it is running.
As a rule of thumb do not use anything in a VM that needs many disk accesses. That kills performance.
Click to expand...

I strongly support what dusk007 is saying. If you need to run Windows-only applications, you might want to try CrossOver, a commercially supported version of Wine, which is a Win32 emulation framework. I use it very successful even with complex application. And they all run native in MacOS.

Go here http://www.codeweavers.com for CrossOver and here for the underlying Wine open source project: http://www.winehq.org
DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation nor any benefit from both links besides very successful usage on MacOS and Linux over many years.

Kind regards,

Manfred
 
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