TiBook users, advice on RAM upgrade needed

[jer_mcclain]

I am thinking about going to a gig of ram on my TiBook 400. Anyone know if this will offer any significant performance gains in Live. Seems that Live is much slower in x than 9.x so I assume more ram will help. Thanks

[stew]

How much RAM do you have right now?

[jer_mcclain]

512mb now but Live doesn't run near as well in X as it did in 9.x

[Alex Reynolds]

Extra RAM will not help until Ableton writes Live to take advantage of it.

-Alex

[stew]

512MB RAM is enough, you will not notice a performance increas when you add RAM.

If Live seems slower in OS X than in OS 9, it's probably due to OS X' preemtive multitasking which might not give Live as much CPU time as it gets in OS 9. If you are not afraid of command lines, you could use the "renice" command to increase the priority of the Live process, that might change things a little.

Strange, I didn't put too much stress on it, but when playing with the Demo version of 1.5 I didn't notice too much of a difference between OS 9 and OS X on my 600 MHz iBook. Anyhow, RAM is surely not the reason why Live feels slower in X on your computer.

[Geraldo]

I thought LIVE streamed from the HD? Am I wrong? If so, there is a tutorial instruction for creating a RAM disk for LIVE somewhere in the turorials section of the website. This tutorial claims it will enhance performance but I have not had a spare moment to try it myself. Has anyone else used a RAM disk? Streaming your clips out of RAM should improve performance I would think... But I may be talking shite. I really should research my suggestions before I post them.

[dirtystudios]

well...i use a tibook 400 with 256mb, and i recently went to x.2. i didn't notice too much of a performance drop, but i seemed to still be reaching the limits of my puter fairly quickly. i thought that maybe i could use a 512 chip and get a boost. well, i never purchased it. only because after opening the process window in x and starting up some of my audio apps (reason (see post script) and live) and seeing exactly what was what deep down in the silicon trenches. it seemed that with even both programs open and playing stuff, i never really saw my ram usage peak above 50%. on the other hand the minute i started up live, it immediately took over, on average, 75% of my cpu...even when it wasn't doing anything, ie., no loops a' playing and no plugins a' plugin'. then i'd start up reason, and the rest of the cpu was being harvested. it looked as if it was totaly maxed out even when nothing was happening. so...i'm pretty sure that i just spent a whole buncha ones and zeros to tell you what a whole buncha people just told you. still, check out the process window and see what your computer's doing, it'll give you an idea of what you might do to improve things.


k


p.s. on a note (pun straight-up intended) that has nothing to do with this thread, i just broke down and (against all of my protools training) got reason. that program should be outlawed because it is just too much fun.

p.p.s. so i basically have absolutely nothing to say that isn't already common knowledge.

[stew]

I thought LIVE streamed from the HD? Am I wrong? If so, there is a tutorial instruction for creating a RAM disk for LIVE somewhere in the turorials section of the website. This tutorial claims it will enhance performance but I have not had a spare moment to try it myself. Has anyone else used a RAM disk? Streaming your clips out of RAM should improve performance I would think... But I may be talking shite. I really should research my suggestions before I post them.

Using a RAM disk will probably only improve performance when the samples you use are larger than OS X' disk cache. I don't have an exact number on how large OS X' disk cache is, but I'd be surprised if it were less than 16MB on a computer with 512MB RAM.