So as I’m continuing through the big scanning project, the thing I’m noticing is that the OctoMac is taking a smoke break every now and then. By that I mean that when I swap from one app to another, not only am I swapping, but the machine is too … to disk, that is.

This beasty ships with 2GB of RAM, which is not nearly enough to satiate eight-cores worth of work. In fact, I’d say it’s barely enough to keep two cores happy. So, swapping to disk is a frequent occurrence. I never really had that problem on the soon-to-be-rehomed Quad G5 — I had 8GB RAM in it (2GB/core, although I’m sure things never really worked out that way), and it rarely ever let me know there was anything but speed going on. The next logical bump up for the OctoBox is to 6GB, and I expect I’ll do that soon. If that doesn’t quite get the performance where it should be, then it’s up to 10GB. This thing’ll take up to 32GB, but 4GB DIMMs are apparently crafted out of priceless material — they ain’t cheap. Pairs of 2GB DIMMs are about $200 from OWC, so 16GB would seem to be my likely maximum.

Just an update from the land of Oc….