idea for running out of RAM

[Gary C Martin]

On 25 Sep 2008, at 01:00, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> I agree with Albert's proposal - Newcomers to the Wellington test team
> open too many apps all the time - and render their machines unusable
> through memory pressure. From that experience, I like the idea of
> adding a bit of metadata that hints the mem footprint, and teaching
> sugar to prevent users from starting new apps if less memory than
> stated is available.

 From your experience are your newcomers accidentally or intentionally  
launching too many Activities? Is it that they genuinely wanted to  
have N activities all running at once? I guess I'm thinking Eben's  
existing design proposal for adding recent Journal activities to the  
Home view icons will solve the accidental cases, but that intentional  
use (where the user does not understand - and most don't - resource  
usage) will still bite novice users until they've had their fingers  
burnt enough times.

Many years back, I used to help support ~100 staff at an Adobe office  
running the mid to late MacOSs. Resolving crashes due to incorrectly  
set memory defaults was pretty high up on the list of constant daily  
issues and user education. I'd say it was a major support issue (but  
below flakey 3rd party start-up extensions, and corrupted preference  
files). Oh happy days...

--Gary