Will changing my OS speed me up?

[Josh Kahane]

Hi

Sorry the title wasnt to clear. I still do everything on an poor old slow mac mini G4 1.25GHz. I am running OS 10.5 with 512Mbs of RAM/memory installed. Will it improve my performance if I go back to Tiger? Will it be less tension on the computer (if you know what i mean)?

Any help much appreciated, thanks.

 

[lee.findlow]

I am using almost exactly the same hardware as you (just 1GB of ram, not 512 Mb) and to be honest switching from Tiger to Leopard for me has given no real difference in speed, although this could be in part due to having more Ram, so Tiger may run better on your hardware, given that you only just meet the required specs for Leopard in terms of Ram.

 

[iShater]

I am not sure how much more speed you will get by downgrading.

I would check to see how much virtual memory you are using. You can verify that in the Activity Monitor.

Find out the PageIn compared to the PageOut for the memory. But I already think you need to have a min of 1GB.

 

[Josh Kahane]

I am in Activity Monitor. I cant find anything about virtual memory or page ins or pages out. How can i find them?

 

[mkrishnan]

Sorry the title wasnt to clear. I still do everything on an poor old slow mac mini G4 1.25GHz. I am running OS 10.5 with 512Mbs of RAM/memory installed. Will it improve my performance if I go back to Tiger? Will it be less tension on the computer (if you know what i mean)?

If you want to keep Tiger because you need it for APIs, etc, and you cannot afford to get to 1GB or farther North, then these are the things you should do:

- Give yourself plentiful free disk space -- like 15% of the drive or 10GB, whichever is larger.

- Turn Dashboard off ( http://www.natal.be/index.php/?p=6 )

- Consider disabling Spotlight indexing of drives, also ( http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050504012104186 )

These will significantly reduce your memory footprint.

To see pageouts, click on the memory tab at the bottom:

In the picture, it's the second number (after the slash) to the left of the blue wedge in the pie chart (some 630k). If this number is larger than 10000, and more importantly is going up daily, then you should probably buy more memory.

 

[Josh Kahane]

Ok, this is what i got:

 

[iShater]

Yikes! You are paging out 72% of what you page in! 😱

I can only imagine how slow that must feel, my 12' PB had a 20-30% ratio and it drove me nuts!

You definitely need more RAM, and I would follow mkrishnan's recommendations and turn off some things that you do not need but take more RAM.

What apps are you running?

 

[Josh Kahane]

Its awful. I know. I dont often run much. I try and limit the number of apps i have running at the same time. I almost always have safari open, quite often mail. The most i usually have running all at once is roughly 4 apps, but i dont usually run several at once to speed me up. When i took that screenshot i was only running safari if thats helpful.