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User profile for user: paulpen
paulpen Author
User level: Level 1
38 points

OS X Tiger Preview RAM huge error

Does anyone know why opening the following PDF in OSX 10.4.11 would cause Preview to lock up the computer and grab ALL available RAM, swap all other applications' active RAM to hard drive, and then grab >>1 GIGABYTE of virtual memory??:


https://www.att.com/media/att/2012/support/pdf/voice_user_guide.pdf


The PDF is ver. 1.6, but even if that contains new features unknown to Tiger's version of Preview, it shouldn't try to grab unlimited RAM. This froze my G4 (spinning beachball), swapped the entire contents of a 300 MB RAMdisk to hard drive, and COMPLETELY FILLED my startup drive (which had around 1.5 GB free).(And i don't want to hear how I should have had lots more free space--then it might have grabbed 10 GB...)


Cmd+Option-Esc wouldn't respond for about a MINUTE (as the OS feverishly filled up the Startup drive); then I got the pop-up:


Warning: Your startup drive is almost full!


At that point there were only 10 MB free on my startup hard drive, which is plainly obscene, if not downright criminal. Yet, from what I can gather, there is no way to limit how much virtual memory an app can try to grab..? (in OS 9, each app was limited, which is obviously a good thing.)

PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11), G4; G5; Dual-Core iMac.

Posted on Dec 1, 2018 8:05 PM

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User profile for user: Allan Jones
Allan Jones
User level: Level 9
68,654 points

Posted on Dec 3, 2018 5:18 PM

Although I love my PPC Macs I don't have one networked right now. I downloaded that link to my 2017 iMac 4.2ghx quad i7 with a lot of RAM, and Activity Monitor showed Preview using only about 45MB RAM, about half of what one of these forum pages uses in Safari.


It is posible that newer pdf-producing apps are creating something not optimized for PowerPC any more. It seemed everyone was quick to run away from PPC support when Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006.


To test from a PPC I need to move the file via thumb drive and I can't do that right now. It will be later tonight or tomorrow before I can test on an appropriate PPC Mac (2005 eMac 1.42gHz SP G4, 10.5.8, 2GB RAM).

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User profile for user: Allan Jones
Allan Jones
User level: Level 9
68,654 points

Dec 3, 2018 5:18 PM in response to paulpen

Although I love my PPC Macs I don't have one networked right now. I downloaded that link to my 2017 iMac 4.2ghx quad i7 with a lot of RAM, and Activity Monitor showed Preview using only about 45MB RAM, about half of what one of these forum pages uses in Safari.


It is posible that newer pdf-producing apps are creating something not optimized for PowerPC any more. It seemed everyone was quick to run away from PPC support when Apple switched to Intel processors in 2006.


To test from a PPC I need to move the file via thumb drive and I can't do that right now. It will be later tonight or tomorrow before I can test on an appropriate PPC Mac (2005 eMac 1.42gHz SP G4, 10.5.8, 2GB RAM).

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OS X Tiger Preview RAM huge error

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