My iMac G5 20" ran out of memory tonight - wouldn't even copy a single word in Word.
Surprising considering it has 512 Mb RAM and a 250 Gig HD. Activity monitor showed over 5 Gigs allocated to virtual memory. I was shocked. The "Real Memory" allocated was about 140Mb. I suspected the problem might be related to putting the machine to sleep, rather than shutting it down each night, over a period of several weeks. Sure enough, a re-boot solved the issues, though VM remains just under 4 Gigs. Has anyone heard of this issue? Is it a problem? I certainly noticed a significant slowing in speed over the last week or three. The re-boot has helped, but it seems there is a lot of "stuff" happening in the background, stealing performance. It seems that even with only about 13 items running in "My Processes" there is a vast array of other items running - say 40 to 50 under "All Processes" One "kernel task" has 46 Mb of real memory and a huge 708 Mb of VM. Should I shut down instead of sleep my iMac? Is there a means of rationing virtual memory (I have 233 Gb free space). Any performance boosting tips? Thanks Bill
