~500 MB "active or wired" RAM in 10.5 - can I reduce this?

Question

Hello!
I have a 15" Powerbook G4, with 1 GB of RAM, running 10.5.1. Previously, I had it running 10.4.11. Leopard is very nice, but it's suffering far more instability than Tiger - simply because I keep running out of RAM.
Under Tiger, a general rule of thumb was that just after startup, and without any open applications (except activity monitor), there would br ~60 MB of "Wired" RAM, and about 100 MB of "Active" RAM. These values are those given by Activity monitor. The "kernel_task" process rarely took up more than ~80 MB, even with a dozen applications running.
Under Leopard, just after startup and with only activity monitor open, I have roughly 150 MB "wired" and roughly 350 MB "active". "kernel_task" usually eats 100-150 MB, even without any running apps. I never have more than about 600 MB free - and usually run between 100-200 MB free with only iTunes and Safari open. While running backups (with .Mac Backup 3.1.2), I've had OS X report more than 3 MILLION page outs! That's a 4 GB swap file! This is proving to be a tremendous slowdown, negating all of Leopard's speed increases. In addition, many applications crash as they run out of RAM - I'll have an application crash every few hours or so under Leopard, while I'd go weeks without a crash under Tiger. Unlike in Tiger, this isn't isolated to ram-hungry applications either - just about anything and everything has crashed when RAM is tight.
Is there anything that I can do that will reduce the amount of RAM used by the system? Are there applications/processes/plugins/etc that OS X loads that are not required, that I can stop? I'd really rather not downgrade to Tiger, but it may prove necessary.
I'd like to drop a 1 GB RAM card into the PB - to get 1.5 GB of total RAM, but I don't have the ~$120 or so to spend on a RAM card in the near future. Anything I can do to reduce RAM usage and speed up the Powerbook would be very helpful.
Thanks,
-Dan

Answer 1

I wonder where you get your RAM prices. I found this at Datamem.com - 1 GB DIMM for $69 w/lifetime warranty.
Face it if you plan to use Leopard your memory needs will at least double. That's partly why Apple specifies 512 MBs as the minimum for Leopard versus the 256 MB minimum for Tiger.
If you're suffering from instability then it's possible you haven't sufficient free space on your hard drive. You should plan to leave not less than 15 percent of the drive's capacity free at all times. Add 8 GBs to that if you regularly burn DVDs.
Be sure your system isn't corrupt. Repair the hard drive and permissions. Use third-party utilities to clear the system, user, and font caches. Be sure the Unix maintenance scripts are being run on schedule.
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.0 is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.2 is Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. The current version, 1.5.1, is Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.