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How to allocate memory to ArchiCAD on the traditional Macintosh
On the traditional Macintosh (OS 9.22 an earlier) memory is not distributed dynamically among applications. Each application has a fix size memory allocated. The applications get installed with a default size of memory allocated. The default size is however often not sufficient for certain memory demanding tasks. Thus the size of the allocated memory has to be modified by the user.
Click on the icon of the application holding the CTRL key pushed. The context sensitive menu appears next to your cursor. Select the "Get Info/Memory" menu-point. A dialog box will appear. There you can set the Minimum size and the Preferred size of memory.
The minimum size is the size that is required to launch the application. If there is not that much memory available the operating system will not even attempt to launch the application.
The preferred size is what the system tries to allocate to the application in an ideal case. If there is not that much memory available the operating system will launch the application allocated all the available memory to it. If there is more memory available than the preferred size only the preferred size will be allocated to the application, the rest will remain free.
If you find that there is not enough memory allocated to ArchiCAD you have to increase the "Preferred size". Note that not the whole free memory is suggested to be allocated to applications. The operating system uses a part of the memory, and for certain actions it requires more free memory to be able to extend.
That is why we suggest that before you set memory to an application, check first under Apple Menu/About This Computer how much memory is used and how much is free. When you increase the memory of an application, do not use up all the free memory. Leave at least 20Mb free for the operating system to be able to extend if needed (in case of older MacOS [i.e. version 7.6 or 8.1] the free part can be smaller - at least 5Mb is however still suggested).
Page last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2004
