Running 19 days
without a restart.

Increase The Memory Partitions In Hidden Applications
by Michael Coyle, 06-04-1999

After updating to MacOS 8.6, users of Speed Doubler experienced system crashes. The unsanctioned solution was to increase the extension's memory partition with ResEdit.

I run several hidden background extension processes and have had random crashes, so I thought I'd look into increasing the memory on all of them. Here's what I did.

To find out which background processes are running, I used a feature of FinderPop.

Under Options, check Process Submenu and Include Backgroud-only Processes.

There are probably many ways to view these hidden apps. RAMDouble and Peek-a-Boo are two other options.

In FinderPop, hidden apps are in italic:

As an example, we will start by increasing the memory partition used by the "Application Switcher".

Open a copy of the extension in ResEdit and open the SIZE resource.

In all of the extensions I modified, there was always only one ID, number -1.

Open it with a double-click.

Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the ID and increase the Size value.

I arbitrarily chose to increase the memory partitions in all my hidden extension apps by roughly 30%.

The result? The random freezing that I was experiencing after updating to MacOS 8.6 has disappeared. While your results will vary, don't worry, performing this edit will do no harm.