Power Mac Applications Require Less RAM with Virtual Memory |
Applications designed to run on the Power Macintosh require less RAM when Virtual Memory is turned on. These same applications will use more RAM when Virtual Memory is turned off.
Applications written for 680x0-based machines store their code segments in
resources within the resource fork. This segmentation of code allows the
Macintosh to only load the needed parts of the application at any one time.
This uses much less RAM than trying to load the whole application into
memory.
Applications designed to run on the Power Mac store their code segments in
the data fork. By default, the Power Mac loads the entire contents of the
data fork into memory, where it is parsed into segments and used as needed.
When you enable virtual memory on the Power Mac, the memory manager gets
"smarter" and it treats the information in the data fork similar to the way
it would treat information in the resource fork. Specifically, code is
loaded from the disk as it's needed. Therefore, an application built to run
on the Power Mac will use less RAM when virtual memory is enabled.
For more information, please see the following article in the Microsoft
Knowledgebase:
Q120506 How Virtual Memory Works on a Power Macintosh
Additional query words: FAT ResEdit Page Size 6.00 power macintosh PPC
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Version : :; MACINTOSH:7.1.2,7.5.x,7.6,8.0
Platform : MACINTOSH
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Last Reviewed: November 23, 1999 © 2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use. |