£20, and a bargain at any price.

[jwz]
comment []  trackback []  8:28:22 PM    

Tivo rocks! Can't recommend it enough. And I don't even have the Series 2, which has support for playing MP3s from iTunes and displaying pictures from iPhoto--all via Rendezvous.
comment []  trackback []  5:52:03 PM    

Here is the problem from my perspective. Normally on a Unix-style system, you pre-allocate a certain amount of disk space for swap. If you run out of swap, you're out of luck, but you normally set your swap pretty high so you're OK. Well, MacOS X dynamically allocates swap for you, as you need it. You'll find the swap files in question in /var/vm. By default, swap is allocated in 80MB chunks. Where I find the system a bit screwy is in its reclaiming of swap space. When your memory needs decrease, MacOS X will delete unneeded swap files. That might seem like a good thing, but for me it just seems to generate disk thrashing as swap files are reaped when I shut down apps. and then recreated when I fire them up again. Since I'm on a laptop, this disk thrashing is particularly annoying. I'd prefer to be able to pre-allocate swap and have MacOS X use that until it runs out. There are undocumented parameters to the dynamic pager that might allow me to configure my system closer to my desires, but I'm hesitant to muck with it too much, as I haven't seen much discussion of the pros and cons.

Am I just missing something? Is everyone else happy with this behavior? Can MacOS X Server really operate this way, as well?
comment []  trackback []  5:46:28 PM