Product

Pandora^® All

Operating system

Mac OS^® 9

Symptoms

Pandora handles memory differently from many other Macintosh^® applications. It is important to have free system memory available when running Pandora; otherwise, you may experience reduced performance or memory errors.

Cause

To improve the performance of applications, users generally try to allocate more memory to the application (for example, Get Info > Memory). While this works well for most applications, it can result in degraded performance and instability in Pandora.

Pandora runs in the Macintosh Runtime for Java environment (MRJ), which automatically allocates memory from the system memory heap. When Pandora requires more memory for an operation, it borrows memory from the system; when the operation is completed, Pandora returns the extra memory to the system. If the system is out of memory, the operation may fail with a Technical error and an OutOfMemoryException in the Pandora log.

Minimum memory configuration for Pandora:
Pandora application: 128 MB (as installed)
System physical memory: 256 MB
System total memory: 512 MB of RAM, including virtual memory

Configuring Pandora to RIP large files:
When previewing some files, Pandora may fail with a Memory Allocation Failed (Data Buffer) error. One or more factors can contribute to this:
* The Screen Cache Size (under Preferences) is set high
* The PDF dimensions are large
* The PDF contains many color separations

Solution

The workarounds are:

A. Decrease the Screen Cache Size

B. Allocate more memory to the Pandora application. Most components of Pandora run in the Java environment and therefore borrow system memory. However, the CPSI RIP is written as a native Mac library. To give the RIP more memory, you must allocate more memory to Pandora (Get Info > Memory). To prevent Pandora from becoming unstable, you must also increase the system memory.

Alternate memory configuration for RIP’ing large files:
Pandora application: 256 MB
System physical memory: 384 MB
System total memory: 640 MB of RAM, including virtual memory

Technical contact(s)

Mat Gessel

Submitted by

Mat Gessel

Date submitted

08 Jan 2003