Some users have noticed that the amount of memory taken up by the Macintosh
system seems to depend on the amount of RAM available.
For instance, in a Macintosh II with 1MB RAM, the system often occupies only
300-400K of memory, but in one user's Macintosh II with 8MB ram, the system
took up 2.6 MB of memory!
The answer is to be found in the Start Manager, which on system startup
assesses a number of variables, including:
- which microprocessor is present
- amount of RAM installed
- whether the RAM Cache is set and for what amount (although this has a greater
impact on the application heap than on the system heap).
The Start Manager dynamically installs what it considers the optimum number of
System resources, Fonts, Inits, DAs, drivers, to give the Macintosh the best
performance. You do NOT have control over what system resources and code are
installed at this point.
You can, however, control the amount of RAM consumed by extraneous Inits and
RDevs, as well as the memory set aside for RAM Cache. Eliminate any extraneous
CDevs containing Inits and RDevs, and choose a smaller RAM Cache setting -- or
turn it off entirely.
As an example, eliminating a couple of CDevs such as Sound Master and ColorDesk
could free up 650K of system heap space, memory that you may need for your
applications.