Very Slow Macs in office

R

roamer

Guest
Hello,
I hope I have posted this in the right area. I am a (kind of) admin in a graphic design agency and we run a few g4's and one g5 here. The g4's are 1.25ghz with 768mb RAM while the g5 is 1.8ghz with over a gig of RAM.

Many are the files here in the office are quite large. 60-70mb with some files going up to and over 400mb. Recently, its come to my attention that the files are opening very slowing on the computers. Many of the workfiles are being saved locally onto the computers so the disks are quite filled up. In the near future we will be moving all the work files onto a new server with tons of space.

Im just wondering, would the reason for this slow opening of files. Could it be due to the disks being quite full or is there other reasons. From my point of view, 768mb of RAM seems to be more than enough. The G5 is alot newer and so I cannot compare them as this still hasn't used up much disk space.

Any help will be appreciated... Thanks
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Performa 6116 2GBSCSI 8MB OS 7.5.3
So currently everyone's own work is on their local Mac? No one accesses files from other peoples Macs?

If you are running Quark or Photoshop or similar type apps it will take a moment to open the file but if you are launching the app as well as the file it will take longer and if you have oodles of fonts it will take much longer.
If the app is already open and you try to open a file on the local HD a 400mb file will take a few seconds to open. This of course depends on the type of file and the complexity of the file. The resolution and number of layers etc.
If you are opening a file that is on the network somewhere such as another Mac it will take longer since it needs to be copied to the other systems first.

Do you reboot your machines ever?

Do you manage your fonts? Font book, Extensis Suitcase X.

What is a long time to open a 100mb file? What app? There may be a patch for the app.

A 400mb file and 768mb of ram is not a good thing. Look at activity monitor after you launch the app and the large file and see what the ram breakdown is.

You should always have 1.5x your ram of free space on your HD to allow for a clean memory dump. That is the general rule. If your ram is already allocated the HD will be used as a swap file or "slow ram" if needed.
 

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