can i assign what amount of ram TM uses, because it always causes problems with other apps, from FireFox to Ableton Live, even Finder... it suck

No, you can't. The OS will determine the RAM allocation, which is a good thing 😉.

If you're having problems, there's something else wrong that needs fixing. What do you mean by

'causes problems with other apps'??

angilo wrote:

e.g. i'm busy recording in Ableton Live, and everything

start to lag as soon as TM starts backing up

thanks for replying

Doesn't sound like a RAM issue to me, sounds like a basic I/O issue. Your recording is writing a lot of data to disc, and TM is reading a ton of data from disc to determine the incremental backup and write it out to the backup drive. All that disc activity will be bound to slow the system down.

The only fix I can see is to disable TM while you are recording.

No, reading from and writing to disc are primarily influenced by the disc itself (how fast it is, how big an onboard cache it has) and the I/O bus bandwidth (basically how big a pipe, and how fast it flows, between the logic board and the drive). Has very little at all to do with RAM. The more data that you are pushing or pulling simultaneiously to/from the drive, the slower the system will be.

Any time disc activity gets high enough, your entire system will slow down - that is inherent in every computer and always has been. It has nothing to do with the app per se, but the hardware has inherent limitations in how much data it can move, and how fast it can move it, in any given time. Finder is also reading data from the same hard drive, over the same data I/O bus as TM and every other app you have running - they all share the same pipeline to the data volume.

TM can indeed "handle it" - do your backups proceed successfully? Does your computer continue to process other tasks while TM is running (albeit at a slower pace)? But until the I/O load drops, system performance will be what it is.

You can upgrade your machine to a newer, faster device. You could replace your hard drive with a faster solid state drive. You could replace your over the air Time Capsule with a high end, faster local hard drive on a very fast wired connection (a firewire 800 or lightening external drive).

But no system has infinite performance capabilities - everything is limited, and when you push one of those criticial limits, like high volume disc input/output, the system will inherently slow down until that load diminishes.

There is an app called TM Scheduler, but I have no experience with it. Even with it, all you can do is change the interval between backups, not actually schedule a specific time (TM simply does not have that capability).

The default is to do a backup every hour (or actually, every 3600 seconds as the backup interval is literally set in seconds). So you can say, change the interval to 43200 seconds, or a backup every 12hours (which is what I use for my TM backups).