How to reduce MUI memory consumption?

[alenppc]

I always wanted an accelerator for my A600, and seeing that Jens gave up on its new A600 accelerator, I decided to look elsewhere... I saw a Viper 630 card for sale ad on amigaworld.net, and decided to buy it. It cost me nearly $300 shipped from Australia, and I received it yesterday. My A600 rocks now!! :-D The only problem with this card is that it has only 4 MB of RAM soldered on board and it cannot be expanded any further (it's a clone of the M-Tec 630 with a slightly lower clock speed). I am using the PCMCIA port for the ethernet card, so I can't add another memory expansion there.

The problem is that whenever I load a MUI program it eats up almost all of the fast memory... I remember how much I loved to surf the net back in 1998 with Voyager NG for which I still own the keyfile I bought back then. I can load it on the A600, and even surf a few websites before the memory runs out. The speed is more than acceptable, but unfortunately I can only load small pages before it runs out of memory and crashes. For instance I can't open amiga.org at all with it. The problem is that when I load the browser (without actually doing any browsing) I have only about 400K of fast ram left, and I'm using an 8 colour screen as well.  However, the result is the same with most MUI programs.

Is there any way to reduce the general MUI memory consumption? I haven't actually customized anything, leaving all of the options at their default values, no background pics at all, I have only changed the default fonts... Any tips?

[Quixote]

:-( Dang, you've already tried what I was going to suggest; dropping custom textures and so on.

I believe that there is a configuration file somewhere that tells MUI what to load at boot.  You could try renaming that file to force MUI to launch without loading anything custom that you forgot to remove.

Also, IIRC, if you highlight the MUI icon and select Info from the menu, you'll have the  opportunity to adjust MUI's stack size directly.  Mind you, it's possible to set it too low, which would prevent some programs from working correctly.

Voyager has it's own stack size too, but again you'll want to be carefull when tweaking it.

;-) Another approach would be to add more Chip RAM, if you haven't already.  For most models of Amigas, it's possible to expand the Chip RAM to two megabytes, instead of the lower sizes that came as standard.  This requires an extra bit of hardware.

At the end of the day, though, you'll only have six megabytes of RAM at best, and some graphically intensive web sites will require more just to open their front pages.  So, you'll always have some site that won't work.

[AmigaMance]

That's right. I don't think there is something else that you can do about it. Lowering the stack of MUI is, afaik, irrelevant as this only afects the memory consumption of the MUI preference program, not MUI itself.
 Another thing that you could try is too fall back to older external MUI classes which requires less memory but they may be buggy or many clients might require newer ones.

 In any way, web browsing with only 4MB of fast-ram... is not enough no matter what you do.

[itix]

Is there any way to reduce the general MUI memory consumption? I haven't actually customized anything, leaving all of the options at their default values, no background pics at all, I have only changed the default fonts... Any tips?

There is nothing to do about it. It is not only MUI but also newer MUI programs need more ram than old MUI programs. I used to browse internet on vanilla A1200 (only 2MB, Miami 1.0, IBrowse 1.0 :-P) but without images of course.

You could disable image/webpage caching to ram in browsers, it maybe helps a little.

[alenppc]

Thanks for the help guys... Btw, I already have 2Mb of chip ram installed.

I tried Ibrowse 1.x and I must say it appears to use way less memory than Voyager. It can load even amiga.org.

:-)