hard memory limits

[James Stroud]

On Friday 06 May 2005 11:27 am, Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> James Stroud wrote:
> > > does Mac OS X ship with memory limits set by default?  isn't that
> > > a single-user system?
> >
> > Dear original poster or whoever is interested in OS X:
> >
> > OS X is not a single user system. It is BSD based unix. And its fv at king
> > sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! (Though I'm using only Linux right now :o/
>
> Well, Apple's marketing materials contain no signs whatsoever that the
> systems Apple sells are designed for massive numbers of users, compared
> to systems from RedHat, Sun, HP, etc.  (if you look at apple.com in this
> very moment, it talks a lot about "your mac" and "your desktop" and "your
> computer", not "the mac/desktop/computer you share with hundreds of
> other users").
>
> So why would Apple insist on setting unusably low process limits, when
> the others don't?
>
> </F>

I think that two different markets exist for this computer:

1. Joe user who has never seen a command line interface. These people need a 
nice, cozy little user environment that takes as little understanding as 
possible to use. They also buy the most computers and are probably most 
responsive to fluffy advertising campaigns. Hence the targeted advertising on 
apple.com In this case, my guess is that memory allocation, etc, is left to 
the application. For cocoa apps it is the objective c runtime handling this 
kind of thing and for carbon apps, it is probobably tacked on during the 
process of carbonizing. But I should say that I really don't know much about 
the low level workings of either.

2. Scientists/Engineers/Programmer types. These people configure their own 
limits instinctively and probably forgot that they ever put that unlimit in 
their rc files (like I did) and the dozens of other customizations they did 
to get their OS X boxes just so for unix use. When Joe User makes the 
crossover, such customizations don't seem very intuitive. Plus, I remember 
having to ulimit my IRIX account on SGIs I used back in the day--so other 
*nixes seem to have similar requirements.

To answer your question, my guess is that no one has complained yet.

James

-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/