Ok, Ok I know for old hands this will not come as a surprise

[nadinbrzezinski]

but the other day I loaded a LARGE file on Corel Painter... yep, 1000 DPI scan, can be a tad intensive.

Anyhow it kept crashing...

It kept crashing

It kept crashing

I went... what I need RAM? But I am over the minimum...

So I enabled virtual memory and problem solved... working happily ever after on my illustrations for new website

;-)

[Bongo Prophet]

1. Good tip - By VM, do you mean the "memory and scratch disk" in Painter's preferences?

Since OsX uses VM as default, I am thinking you turned on the scratch disk, but I could be wrong.
This is a good thing to check, as it is in Photoshop, Final cut, etc.
More reasons for big hard drives.

:/

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. In system preferences under security

and yes I have been able to work on my art since, no problem

It is the VM

[Bongo Prophet]

3. Hmm, I only see "use secure virtual memory" which I have off,

(it still uses VM, just not encrypted) and am trying to understand how that would help.

It may be different because I am on powerpc/tiger, and you on intel/leopard, if I recall.
A similar effect happens by rebooting, clearing up RAM and hard drive caches used by VM paging - if there is any corruption or too much fragmentation (or memory leaks) you can get a crash on large files. Changing to secure virtual memory just rewrites the VM data anew, and would therefore be avoiding the same corrupted bits, as far as I understand.

at any rate---
It is VERY good news that it works for you, and thanks for sharing- if that ever happens to me, I will give it a shot.

On that note, an interesting article on making sure you don't have orphaned files taking up space after switching it on:
http://www.applepedia.com/Secure_virtual_memory

Every little bit of drive space is a good thing.
Thx again NB.
:thumbsup:

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. I'm on leopard and checked on

Corel, it is at 80% right now, Of course I will be getting an external drive soon... which wil be larger than the internal drive. Which means... it will have more space

I went, is this a virtual drive? It sure as heck seems to be working that way.

And the good news is... it has not crashed, or is not slow as molasses, As is I may add RAM to this machine soon, but that is a whole different ball of wax

;-)

[moggie]

5. You won't get any more virtual memory that way

That setting just ensures that a bad guy who gets hold of your machine won't be able to retrieve any meaningful data from the virtual memory area on disk (without that checkbox checked, data which would normally be transient in memory, such as plaintext passwords, can lurk on disk for anyone who knows where to look for it). Setting that checkbox makes your machine slightly more secure, at the cost of slowing it down slightly. It makes no difference to the amount of virtual memory available.

Activity Monitor (in Applications->Utilities) can tell you what memory is available, and how much each application is using.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. THen I have no idea why it became stable all of a sudden

and no, did not turn the machine off and on (which also releases RAM)

[moggie]

7. But did you reboot?

That may sound like a silly question, but when you check the "secure virtual memory" a message will tell you that the setting won't come into effect until you reboot. Rebooting, of course, frees all memory. If you didn't reboot, perhaps you restarted Corel or some other application. The application might have a memory leak which causes it to use more and more virtual memory over time; restarting it will free this up.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Not before I used it

I have been rebooting every day, as I leave my MBP off overnight.

Hmmm weird, as to memory leaks... yep, I have used programs in the past with them and it is annoying.