First off: Macbook, 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo running Leopard with 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM and plenty of disc space for virtual memory. I'm running the game in Crossover, a commercial WINE-based program.
It seems like once my fortress gets to around 60+ dwarves I inevitably suffer a crash, which I assume is due to my memory being swamped since there's no pattern to the crashes besides my fort getting to a nice big size. In accordance with the advice on the wiki I've done my best to limit traffic using zones, to atomsmash an overabundance of items on the ground and to block off various areas so that the pathfinding algos aren't searching all willy-nilly, but I've had this issue repeatedly. My fort gets big, game crashes, I load an older save, I play until it gets bigger, crashes. My FPS is capped at 80, and flaps around 50 - 80 even right before the game tanks. When I have my OSX version of task manager open I see the game using the vast majority of system resources but no worse than most games. Right before the crash I tend to have a spike in memory use and then, naturally, it flatlines. I have graphics turned off, but I'm using Phoebus' tileset.
My question is: Is this crashing likely related to my system not being able to handle the game, or does the game just crash a lot in general and I should try to struggle through and hope I get lucky? Is this possibly avoidable by more drastic means in-game, like forcing out a game world with different parameters? I tried to find a guide on how to limit the Z-count but I got confused as to how one specifically limits that in the worldgen, uh, thingy.