Acquiesce System for Gaming?

[jzdziarski]

I'm curious if anyone's come up with a good approach to shutting down all noncritical services (quickly) to start up a rather large game (such as UT 2k4). Rebooting will only get you so far. I'd like to be able to:

- Flush all inactive memory
- Shut down all noncritical services, such as indexing, the Dock, Widgets, etc.
- Quit any open applications

with a single script. Sure, I can kill -9 a bunch of stuff, but there's got to be a better way. And that won't really help with my inactive memory either. This is a Powerbook G4 system with 1GB of RAM, yet it seems to run much smoother after shutting down as much as I can.

Jonathan

 

[Lt Major Burns]

i'd also like this for illustrator at times.

a way to flush the memory and caches of stuff not needed toward the main program...

 

[jzdziarski]

I suspect it depends on the program. In a gaming environment, it's not likely to page out the entire 200-300MB of inactive memory at once. If it only needs 10-20 MB, it will page that out, then page out some more when it needs it. This usually causes the game to stutter quite a bit.