Spaces - does it help with fast switching between applications?

[Mikey]

A friend of mine has constant problems with application switching - the system taking ages to reallocate memory from Flash, for example, to Photoshop or Illustrator. He often needs to run all three of these applications, as well as mail and firefox, and going from a big Flash project to Illustrator or Photoshop results in the beach ball of boredom for up to a few minutes before he can do anything.

If he had each application in a different space, (ie upgrade the OS from 10.4) would the system reallocate memory faster? He has a Core Duo Macbook Pro 2.0Ghz and 2Gb memory.

[techydude]

sounds more like not enough RAM. use Activity Monitor to check page-ins/page-outs/swap-used, & if those numbers are significant, then it won't matter which way you shift focus from one app to another, Spaces included.

[NeoRicen]

No it wouldn't. It would probably make it slightly slower (probably unnoticeably) since it has to run the switching animation.

Leopard in general might, but I'll hazard a guess and say it's more of a hardware issue, he needs more RAM (although 2GB might be the max for that model) and/or a faster processor (or whatever allocates memory, probably some bus somewhere).