iStat

Now that I am all about digital photography (at least this week) I've noticed some limitation of having only 2GB of RAM. If anything will tax your system, be it PC or Mac, it is digital media. Aperture really puts some serious load on my Mac Pro. I wanted to see exactly how much.

Introducing iStat. It's a great little application (donation ware) that comes in either Widget or application flavors. It shows about everything you would want to know (except individual cpu load on the dual intel machines). You get CPU load, Memory usage, Disk usage, Network ID and transmit receive stats as well as up time. I highly recommend it.

Here's the load on my Mac Pro with Diggnation playing in a full screen window on a second monitor while using Safari and Mail

noload

And here is the same machine running Aperture ONLY
Temp

I was a little surprised that Aperture didn't use more resources. Granted, I wasn't editing photos, I was just viewing them in the Aperture browser. Still, I'm asking Santa for another 1GB of Ram for my system.

Note: I realize that the images are not showing up right now. I'm investigating the sources right now and hope to have everything fixed soon.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,