safari, a web surfing page uses 300mb of ram and 1.2gb of virtual memory on my mac g4 powerbook laptop 1.5ghtz power pc. 1.5gb ram, 60gb hhd, os 10.5.6. photoshop cs2 uses 75mb ram not doing anything and 500mb+ when doing heavy lifting. is there any way to change safaris ram allotment?

also, mail is running slow frequently, typing is really slow, i can out type it while i wait for the words to appear. clearing old messages out seems to help, but after just a week or two, maybe 150 messages and not with large attachments, just normal text only messages, it starts to do it again.

perhaps i am rammed out? using the activity monitor, even with PS doing heavy lifting 200mb of ram is still available. i did change the max ram for PS to 50% of total ram vs 70%. any tips for where to put this figure?

thanks

1.5GB of RAM is not much for heavy Photoshop work. There's no way to limit Safari RAM size. You can check page outs in the terminal (with the top command) to see if your Mac is swapping memory. Memory is not the only cause of slow-dlowns, hard drive is often the weak link and it becomes even more obvious with memory pageouts.

When you open Safari, it starts with only 50-60 Mb... frequently opening new pages, tabs and windows during the day adds to memory usage, while closing them does not result in an equal reduction in memory use. The only thing that helps is to quit Safari completely and reopen it (i.e., Safari/Quit Safari, or Command Q) from time to time.