Sunday, October 7, 2012

Mac Adobe Tip

I'm running a Mac Pro on Lion, OS-X 10.7.5. I haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion yet because I'm waiting for some reasons. There isn't anything with it I need or want and there's a lot I don't like or want. But I'll eventually go to it later this fall because I'm usually 3-4 months behind for updates.

Anyway, I've written about the purge command to clear inactive memory. You don't need any third party app for this, just a terminal window. The purge command doesn't touch active or currently used memory and it temporarily stalls your Mac while it's clearing the memory.

This is a great tool if you keep the Activity Monitor window open (usually hidden until necessary) to check memory usage. I use it with the Console app to watch the Mac. I have 16 GBybtes of cpu memory, so that's not the issue, but applications which eat memory are an issue with me.

And one of those are Adobe's applications. I run one of the Creative Suite packages with additional applications and often have 4-6 open at once to do various things (why the cpu memory). When you open an Adobe application, it starts both the application and an Adobe Crash daemon.

And that's the issue, the crash daemon. One is created for each applications and they eat memory over time where in 1-2+ days where the crash daemon is using active memory than the applications itself. With several Adobe applications, this can easily add up to .5-1.0 GBytes of memory.

It's not a problem for my Mac until I get to 12+ GBytes of active memory and then applications have to start swapping and writing memory in/out. With Mac it's doubtful you'll see any performance changes beyond some appearing to be slightly slow.

This does become an bigger issue if you run some music or video applications where you load audion or video files. Photography image files aren't an so much an issue unless you have several large one open, meaning in the hundreds of MBytes. Then the performance will be somewhat noticeable.

So the tip here is not hide an Adobe application if you don't need it for awhile, but close them and recover the memory with the purge command. The Mac are designed so it's unnecessary as it will recover the memory if it needs it, but closing the application and using the purge command is better.

That's it. Just a tip.

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