EverQuest Forum

I often experience crashes when running Everquest under Crossover 13.1.3 - mostly resulting from low frame rates leading to hangs when crossing heavily populated zones. If it wasn't for this, I'd say that EQ runs very well.

I also typically leave Safari running for weeks at a time, with many open tabs (20-50). Recently, it seems that EQ runs much better after quitting Safari. There might be no connection, or may just be related to memory or CPU load, but I think it is worth pointing out.

20-50?!?!

Yeah it might be a good idea to turn that off before you play any game.

If you work like this with almost any browser, you'll almost certainly end up with a low memory condition (and related errors) on your machine. Check with Activity Monitor how much free memory you have and either use a utility like eg. MemoryBooster to "clean up"/purge the memory in low memory conditions or do it manually (purge cmd in Terminal) or quit your browser before running other memory intensive programs.

Despite all the docs (and many opinions) saying that the system is capable of sorting stuff like that out, experience has shown that at least on OS X, the system often doesn't handle low memory well at all.

I often work like this as well as I need several browsers and often many tabs open when working. Having many tabs open is almost as bad as having many windows open and eg. Chrome on my system will use 2 to 3 GB+ of memory for ~20 to 25 open tabs. When the inactive memory shrinks to less than ~1GB, my system starts to behave erratically to the point of me sometimes having to reboot to clear the situation. If I start a program like eg CrossOver in such a situation, it will fail to run normally or even if CrossOver starts normally one of the WineLoaders will fail to run properly.

Usually Flash applets, especially poorly written ads, are causing troubles when the browser is open. Safari in Mavericks is a lot better in this regard than other browsers on other platforms because it doesn't start those applets by default.

For other browsers, there often exist extensions like eg. Tampermonkey plus scripts (which is what I am using) that allow you this (selective) functionality.

I'd expect that memory fragmentation from long running processes (i.e. Safari) is nearly as significant.

It's much more common now than it was say 10 years ago to keep many browser tabs open, so I hope this tips helps other people. EQ inside CrossOver is muh more stable with some of the memory hogs shut down - Mail, Safari being by far the biggest ones for me.