[OS X TeX] New iMac

[Herbert Schulz]

On Dec 2, 2009, at 6:02 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote:

> 
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 11:14 , Herbert Schulz wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Dec 2, 2009, at 12:20 PM, George Gratzer wrote:
> [snip]
>> Wow... now how can I get one of those new iMacs? I pretty much live with my pre-unibody 15" MacBook Pro so maybe I can swing going from 2GB RAM to 4GB RAM. Wonder what kind of performance increase I can expect from that change? I'm still amazed by my system after having the last 15" PowerBook before going Intel.
> 
> Herb,
> 
> You can get a feeling for the effect of the extra memory by using some of the performance monitoring tools available on the Mac.
> 
> If you are willing to use Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), run 'top'.
> 
> This will fill your screen with lots of data, and the data you want is on line 6.  It looks something like this:
> 
> VM: 19G + 377M   12132722(0) pageins, 326697(0) pageouts
> 
> The first part tells you how much virtual memory (disk + ram) you have [19 GB]; the second gives the amount used for shared libraries [377 MB].  The second two values are the current counts since restart and, in parens, the change since the last sample.
> 
> Top samples every 2 seconds by default.
> 
> 'man top' will give you more info than you'll ever need.
> 
> To exit the program, just type 'q'
> 
> Armed with this tool, you can make a run with the TeX processor of choice, and observe the changes as you go.  Run it on a clean system (or one that's not been TeXing for a while), and then run it again right away.  If there's a lot of pageins, and the count increases don't change much between the two runs, it could be that doubling your memory will help.
> 
> HTH (I'm assuming you don't normally fiddle around with this stuff; sorry if it's old hat).
> 
> Justin
> 

Howdy,

Thanks for this information. No fear of Terminal and know about top but just forgot that line and its meaning.

On first run hundreds of pageouts but no pageouts on second run compiling a large document. I guess that means I don't run all that much at once very often so I have lots of free memory and should not expect much speed gain by going from 2GB to 4GB RAM. Saves me money! :-)

Of course there are times...

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)