Do externals consume much memory when they are not used ?

Roald Baudoux's icon

Hello,

I have installed several hundreths externals in my Max 5 configuration.

Apart from making the startup duration longer, do these externals use a significant amount of RAM when they are not used ?

Thank you in advance.

Jeremy's icon

In nearly all cases, if they aren't loaded into an object, they aren't using any RAM whatsoever.

Hans Höglund's icon

Nope, they are just files until you add them to a patch.

Alexandre's icon

> "...making the startup duration longer,"

mmh, i didn't even think about that.. Is this the reason why Max takes 4 minutes to launch on my MBP 2,4Ghz ?

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seejayjames's icon

did u try trashing Preferences folder, then manually re-adding your externals folder to the search path on startup? might help... the Prefs folder tends to fill up and start bogging things down after awhile.

Noob4Life's icon

(wow, Alexandre, that's pretty much every good 3rd party external you could ever want or need!)

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*Never fear, Noob4Life was never here!*

Alexandre's icon

> "try trashing Preferences folder"

Thanks, this is faster now. (Although i had weirds messages (on the pic) in max window on the 2st startup. But no more now.)

> " that's pretty much every good 3rd party external you could ever want or need!"

Yeah, perhaps i should get some off, as i just really use 5% of them... Would that improve something?

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Alexandre's icon

By the way, all my patch cords are now black. How can i change the default color for patch cords ?
I did that before but cannot recover how...

Alexandre's icon

Found it: Options > Object Defaults > "Default Patchline color"