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New Powerbook slowing down? RAM related? 1.5GB installed

L

Laplace

macrumors member
Original poster
Hey guys, I just recently got my Powerbook G4 1.67Ghz/1.5GB Ram/128VRAM, and everything is great. However, recently, most notably today, it has been slowing down quite a bit on everyday tasks. Now this may just be because I am running too many open programs, but with 1.5Gig of ram, I would figure that I could run just about anything that I want to without noticing too much of a slow down.

I attached some pictures below of my activity monitor for RAM, does anything stand out to you guys as taking up too much RAM, etc?

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it usually sleeps overnight, and for the past day or so I have been keeping it from sleeping so that I can keep downloading via Azureus. So maybe the maintenance tools haven't been doing there job. How do I run these manually? Do I have to use macjanitor, or can i do it without a 3rd party app?

Thanks,
Laplace
 

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Laplace said:
Hey guys, I just recently got my Powerbook G4 1.67Ghz/1.5GB Ram/128VRAM, and everything is great. However, recently, most notably today, it has been slowing down quite a bit on everyday tasks. Now this may just be because I am running too many open programs, but with 1.5Gig of ram, I would figure that I could run just about anything that I want to without noticing too much of a slow down.

I attached some pictures below of my activity monitor for RAM, does anything stand out to you guys as taking up too much RAM, etc?

I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it usually sleeps overnight, and for the past day or so I have been keeping it from sleeping so that I can keep downloading via Azureus. So maybe the maintenance tools haven't been doing there job. How do I run these manually? Do I have to use macjanitor, or can i do it without a 3rd party app?

Thanks,
Laplace
Click to expand...
Azureus might be the only problem since its a memory hog, I think it also has its problems with memory leeks, and its written in Java (which is a little bit more sluggish than Cocoa/Objective-C). I would just use the regular bittorrent client and not Azureus.

It could also be related to your non matching pair of RAM. That balance between the chips isn't there, which you would have if you only had a Gig of RAM.
 
varmit said:
Azureus might be the only problem since its a memory hog, I think it also has its problems with memory leeks, and its written in Java (which is a little bit more sluggish than Cocoa/Objective-C). I would just use the regular bittorrent client and not Azureus.

It could also be related to your non matching pair of RAM. That balance between the chips isn't there, which you would have if you only had a Gig of RAM.
Click to expand...
I don't think that matching chips are that big of a deal on a G4 Powerbook. I bet it is Azureus. There are lots of reports of Azureus grabbing all open RAM and causing insane swapping across all OS's it supports. Ditch it and use Bits on Wheels or something, if you use Bittorrent a lot. Then check your mem usage after switching.

Jim
 
Could it be the process "DTV" using up 75% of your CPU time? Unless you were simply running that while you were taking the screenshot.
 
I think I was running DTV while taking the screenshot. More than likely it is Azureus. Dang, it was such a good bittorrent client too. Oh well
 
jim. said:
I don't think that matching chips are that big of a deal on a G4 Powerbook. I bet it is Azureus. There are lots of reports of Azureus grabbing all open RAM and causing insane swapping across all OS's it supports. Ditch it and use Bits on Wheels or something, if you use Bittorrent a lot. Then check your mem usage after switching.

Jim
Click to expand...
It's called a memory leak, the application is asking for a block of memory -- but it's not releasing it after it's done, so it'll eventually eat all the memory.

Quit the application, and you may need to log out and log back in to clear everything up.
 
Sun Baked said:
It's called a memory leak, the application is asking for a block of memory -- but it's not releasing it after it's done, so it'll eventually eat all the memory.

Quit the application, and you may need to log out and log back in to clear everything up.
Click to expand...

Yeah dude. You have 330,000 pageouts! 😱 Any computer will slow down with that many pageouts. You obviously have a lot of RAM, so as others have said, it's a memory leak.
 
dferrara said:
Yeah dude. You have 330,000 pageouts! 😱 Any computer will slow down with that many pageouts. You obviously have a lot of RAM, so as others have said, it's a memory leak.
Click to expand...
Whats a pageout and how do you fix that? I'm at like 16k right now. 😕
 
Ok, i got rid of Azureus and logged out. but I still have 330k pageouts. Do I have to restart to fix this? Or does this mean that the problem is coming from somewhere else?

Also, anytime I am running iChat, when I look into the activity monitor, it tells me that the process "iChatAgent" is not responding and is highlighted in red. However, iChat works fine. Whats going on here and could this be what is causing my massive amount of pageouts?

Thanks for the help, BTW the computer is running a lot smoother, but I think it could still run smoother.

Thanks,
Laplace
 
Well, in that case it seems like I have even more pageouts - around 450K with a 3 day uptime - and I don't run Azureus.

I'm not sure the two are necessarily related more than Azureus simply being a resource hog.
 

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Y0zza: You don't have enough RAM, or you're frequently running another program with a memory leak. It's most likely RAM. 😉 You can't stop your computer from getting PageOuts. A "Pageout" means that you don't have enough memory to run the tasks you want, and so it has to access the HD and use some HD space as RAM, meaning your computer has to send some of the bits and bytes "out" to your HD. Page-ins are normal. 🙂

@Laplace: You can't "fix" the number of page-outs. It's just an indication of how much your HD has had to work as memory. It's just a count. You can restart and it'll go back down to zero. However, it's not a big deal. Just make sure it doesn't increase heaps for the next week with Azureus NOT running. Then we'll know if Azureus was the problem.
 
Laplace said:
Ok, i got rid of Azureus and logged out. but I still have 330k pageouts. Do I have to restart to fix this? Or does this mean that the problem is coming from somewhere else?

Also, anytime I am running iChat, when I look into the activity monitor, it tells me that the process "iChatAgent" is not responding and is highlighted in red. However, iChat works fine. Whats going on here and could this be what is causing my massive amount of pageouts?

Thanks for the help, BTW the computer is running a lot smoother, but I think it could still run smoother.

Thanks,
Laplace
Click to expand...

The iChat agent, correct me if I'm wrong, is a bug in Tiger and Apple has refused to fix it as of now. Maybe it'll change in 10.4.3 - I got this info from ITASOR 😉

iGary said:
That is an assload™ of page outs.
Click to expand...
I agree. wow.
 
Does it look like this?

P.S. I don't have anything really open because I just fired up my computer. I am a power user 😉.
 

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Abstract said:
Y0zza: You don't have enough RAM, or you're frequently running another program with a memory leak. It's most likely RAM. 😉 You can't stop your computer from getting PageOuts. A "Pageout" means that you don't have enough memory to run the tasks you want, and so it has to access the HD and use some HD space as RAM, meaning your computer has to send some of the bits and bytes "out" to your HD. Page-ins are normal. 🙂
Click to expand...
1.5GB isn't 'enough'? 😉

Yes, I'm aware of how paging works 🙂

It's not the absolute number that matters, but rather the rate at which paging occurs. Having a few million pageouts over the course of a several month uptime isn't much to worry about, whereas having the same number in a day would.

In any case, I think my pageouts are more to do with my multi-tasking habits more than anything else 😉
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