An Inexpensive Solution for Networked Computations
Linked by Kasra Yousefi on Fri 7th Jan 2005 17:44 UTC
Editorial Problem: Even the most powerful PC's become non responsive during resource-intensive computations, such as graphic design, media, image rendering and manipulating. The traditional solution has been to upgrade to a faster computer and throw more computing power at the problem to lessen the wait-time. But there's a simple solution that utilizes multiple machines, but without using grid/clustering. For now, this involves a hack, but how hard would it be for an OS vendor to streamline this process?
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OS X is fine with compute bound tasks
by Jon on Fri 7th Jan 2005 19:40 UTC

The problems arise with disk bound tasks. In particular, when you run out of real memory and have to swap. When you try to multitask on a machine where one app is consuming a lot of memory not only is the app you are trying to use starved of RAM, but it competes with the first app for disk IO to swap.
Almost inevitably poor performance in these scenarios can be improved by buying suficient RAM for the primary task to run in memory. For Photoshop this could easily be a couple of gigabytes.