[Cortig]

OK, I have no hard evidence for that, but I'm seriously starting to suspect that OW is responsible for the accumulation of swap files on my boot volume. The applciation itself is not using so much memory, but if I keep it open in the background, after a day or so I accumulate more swap files than my drive can handle.
Without OW active: no swap file problem.
Any suggestion as to how I could investigate that better??

Corentin

[Forrest]

Is it similar at all to my posts here:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=118 ?

[Cortig]

Originally Posted by Forrest

Is it similar at all to my posts here:
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=118 ?

Wellllll, in some respect, it could be related. If the Mac is running out of memory and creating swap files by the dozen, OW will be slower - so will all apps on your Mac.
A Sample of OW shouldn't tell much though.
You can try this in the Finder: use command-shift-g to get to /var/vm/ and check out how many swap files you have in there (and how big they are).
My G5 currently only has 2 64MB files right now (but I have 2GB of RAM and I did not keep OW running at all times on this machine lately),

Corentin

[Forrest]

I have one, 64MB swap file. OW did crash earlier today, but my system has been up for five days.

PM G5 2.7, 4.5GB RAM, 10.4.6, 77GB+ free on boot drive.

When I experience slowdowns, it's just OW. Although it does go up and over 100% CPU usage, the rest of the system remains responsive.

[JKT]

My god, the advantage of having 4.5GB of RAM - I regularly have 1GB worth of swap files and in more unfortunate times that grows to 2GB!

:p

[Forrest]

Originally Posted by JKT

My god, the advantage of having 4.5GB of RAM - I regularly have 1GB worth of swap files and in more unfortunate times that grows to 2GB!

:p

FWIW, I've been unable to fill all the RAM. I can work on some very high-res and complex photoshop files, and I've only been able to get 3.5GB out of free or inactive. I'm running CS2.

I leave all my applications open for weeks at a time. (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Word, Excel, OmniGraffle, four browsers, QT, chat & messaging software, Mail.app, iCal, Freehand, BBEdit... and then a ton of little apps...) I typically only restart to install OS updates.

That all said I still don't fully understand memory usage. I only have that one, 64MB swap file but Activity monitor shows kernel_task using 1.8GB, Photoshop using 1.3GB...

[Mad Hatter]

Buy more memory? How much do you have? I would guess that 1.5GB should be pretty normal for most use. Definitely more than the "minimums" of 512MB or so. And more for G5s even than G4 systems (no idea what MacIntel but suspect that Rosetta likes to have plenty!).

I have 1.75GB and almost never see more than one swap file - for some reason installing one piece of software created a couple on another system with only 1GB - I keep a window on the desktop to /private/var/vm when I want to know.

You might want to boot into Single User Mode and check your disk if it got too full, then, if you have Applejack, run that and remove all the cache folders and swap files - best way I know - as well as backup and make more room or get a new drive.

[AEGM9X]

Originally Posted by Mad Hatter

Buy more memory? How much do you have? I would guess that 1.5GB should be pretty normal for most use. Definitely more than the "minimums" of 512MB or so. And more for G5s even than G4 systems (no idea what MacIntel but suspect that Rosetta likes to have plenty!).

I have 1.75GB and almost never see more than one swap file - for some reason installing one piece of software created a couple on another system with only 1GB - I keep a window on the desktop to /private/var/vm when I want to know.

You might want to boot into Single User Mode and check your disk if it got too full, then, if you have Applejack, run that and remove all the cache folders and swap files - best way I know - as well as backup and make more room or get a new drive.

Thanks for volunteering some help, but I don't need any as I was working with UNIX when AT&T still owed it ;)

I would rather Omni searched for (and cured) the cause, than users suggest how to put up with the symptoms.

NB: I deliberately have CRASHREPORTER=-NO- in /etc/hostconfig and kern.coredump=0 in /etc/sysctl.conf

I have this from a JavaNativeCrash log with the example described earlier:

java_command: <unknown>
Unknown Signal (13): SIG_IGN, sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (30): [OmniCrashCatcher+0x1fb0], sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000040
Unknown Signal (31): SIG_DFL, sa_mask[0]=0x00000000, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (1): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (2): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (3): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002
Unknown Signal (15): [libjvm.dylib+0x2866a4], sa_mask[0]=0xfffefeff, sa_flags=0x00000002

As I write SP7 has just crashed again, spontaneously:

Process: OmniWeb (5.5 sneaky peek 7 (v578) (Apr 27 2006))
exception = 0x00000001, code = 0x00000001;0x10965000;

This time I have an OmniCrash report to send in :) what fun.

From a commercial point of view any requirement to have N Gb of memory for a browser is going to be a barrier to sales. If this product wants to sell to the largest possible number of Mac users then it needs to manage to run within the system requirements of the OS (which are more than sufficient to support a browser).

For those with low memory systems that like to see their browser fail, here's another candidate http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

Once again, my advice to Omni is for QA to test on low end Macs as shipped.

[Mad Hatter]

Just because you and I are probably in our 60's doesn't mean we don't need help sometimes ;) (and I am old enough to have seen disk drums connected to PDP-8).

however, pulling the plug is a sure way to end up with a corrupt filesystem.

I spent the am and watched memory. 200MB while surfing through hundreds of photos (most small, none were huge) but as soon as I opened some tabs, probably 60 from one bookmark folder, memory started climbing quite a bit so sure seems like tabs are spawning their own memory cache.

Even a well behaved server can ultimately need to have a reboot to reclaim memory. Even a B2.

However, 5.1.3 is not very good at threading or opening those same 60 tabs and many would time out or fail and OW had begun to feel sluggish and slow compared to the latest Firefox 1.5.x.

A lot of small problems can be helped (and cured) with fsck and Applejack. I hope you use both after pulling the plug. Something I've never needed or had to do.

[bethkatz17582]

I decided to slip into the slow lane and installed sp7 on my kids' machine. It's a 400 MHz blue-and-white G3 with 640MB of memory running OS X 10.4.6. I don't have a "minimal" memory machine. Yes, it felt very slow, but it was doing okay (even with loading that Million Dollar Home Page). I tried to use up all the memory using other apps as well (Safari, iPhoto, Enigmo). OW hung out with about 100MB of real memory. Yes, it would be nice if that were a smaller footprint, but things were happening.

I wandered around trying to load pages and eventually got to a page where Activity Monitor showed OW going in and out of responding. But now I see that the "page" I was trying to load was a PDF that did eventually display on the page:
http://www.nso.edu/general/observe/sched/dst_may06.pdf

There may be something funky in that file because it's taking a while to display it in Preview or the Finder's inspector panel on my dual 1.2 GHz G4. On my G4, I download PDFs to the desktop, so I'm not sure if this is a bug only on slower machines or with the PDF in-browser rendering.

I never managed to get OW on my G3 completely back from trying to display that document. I ended up Force Quitting after taking various samples and pictures.

But I'm one data point for using OW5.5sp7 on a lower end much older Mac. I'm not saying there isn't a memory leak, but it is usable and the Million Dollar Home Page didn't immediately crash it or soak up enormous amounts of memory. It stayed up longer than Firefox seems to on that machine. So maybe something else is happening in your system.