1.5 GB of RAM...and still Pageouts???

[supafly1703]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?

[gekko513]

Virtual memory works in mysterious ways.

I think it's supposed to be like that. I guess there must be some kind of mechanism that determines parts of RAM that is less likely to be used and pages it out even though it's not strictly necessary.

[colosodian]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?

wow, I only have 1GB and my computer has been on for 2 days = 68 page outs.

[beige matchbox]

2 days since last reboot on the powerbook, been running all the normal stuff +pshop and world of warcraft (uses lots of ram) and i have 808 pageouts :)

i normally have mail, safari (2-3 windows with 5 tabs each), adium and itunes running, everything else gets exited when i'm done.



If i were you, i'd download OnyX and give your mac a thorough clean out, followed by a repair permissions and a reboot :)


Unless you doing some extreme tasks, or have had you mac running for a couple of months 100k sounds rather high :eek:

[Mac_Freak]

For me, specs on the bottom, after 16 days of uptime it is 1,359,630 pageins and 239,272 pageouts. :D

[Bear]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?It's not how many pageouts you have, it's how many per seceond that you have. Another thing to look at is the total size of the swapfiles in /var/vm - note do not delete these, the OS manages the creation and deletion itself.

As for the number of pageouts, my system with 2 GB of ram has been up about 10 days and has over 300,000 pageouts. For us to answer your questions, how long has your system been up, what applications are you running? And web browsers tend to need to be restarted once every few days, they all seem to leak memory.

[p0intblank]

Can someone please explain to me what a pageout is?

[Bear]

Can someone please explain to me what a pageout is?Yes we could. However, just go over to Wikipedia and look at their artcle on paging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging).

[eva01]

Can someone please explain to me what a pageout is?

when your computer has to access the drive instead of your ram, high number of pageouts in short amount of time means you need more RAM, for instance. my powermac has 2GB of RAM and has never had a pageout yet, however my powerbook has 512MB RAM and normally has about a hundred thousand pageouts but for some odd reason it has 0 right now (must have restarted lately)

[FFTT]

The worst thing I ever did to bog down my system was to install Virex 7.5

I trashed it after 2 days and reverted to 7.2 and really don't need it at all.

Norton's is even worse.

You might want to check to see what you have pre-set in your startup items.
Sometimes default app settings will launch a program that you don't need.

Activity monitor should also tell you what's running.

You also might want to try Tiger Cache Cleaner to help you maintain your system.

Sorry I'm not much help tonight.

[Bear]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?How many widgets are you running? Some of the widgets seem to be memory hungry.

[BiikeMike]

Where do you see your number of pageouts?

[p0intblank]

Ah, I understand now. Thanks!

[.:*Robot Boy*:.]

Where do you see your number of pageouts?

Open Activity Monitor, go into System Memory and look in the second column, it should say "Page ins/outs: xxxx/xxxx" (where 'x' is a number).

[Daveway]

free/inactive?

[Abstract]

Instead of using Activity Monitor, just go into Terminal and type "top" without the quotation marks(" "). To check your uptime, go into Terminal and type "uptime" without the quotation marks.

Anyway, you get pageouts when your system needs RAM, and there's no free RAM available. Don't worry, even with 2 GB of RAM, sometimes your system needs to use your HD as RAM even if you only have 1 program in use because some of that RAM is still assigned to those inactive programs to make them load faster.

Anyway, Supafly's case seems unusual anyway. That's a lot of pageouts for someone who isn't doing anything strenuous. I don't do anything strenuous with my system either and I have 5000 page-outs after 15 days of uptime.

Go into "ABOUT THIS MAC." Does OSX recognize your 1.5GB of RAM? If not, then there may be something wrong with that RAM slot, or with the RAM itself (less likely).

[Chundles]

Mine's been up just shy of 9 days and has 72700 page outs compared with close to 300,000 page ins. Not too bad at all I don't think considering I've been doing some video encoding recently.

[BlizzardBomb]

Running classic can be a real memory hog, so have you ever run that recently?

[DJY]

1G RAM in my PB...
page ins/outs 46606/9453

guess mine is ok?! So I guess I have matched the right spec for the majority of the tasks I do.

[eXan]

I usualy get lots of page outs when I play some intesinve games like KOTOR and UT2004. If I dont game the pageouts start increasing when I have Photoshop and iPhoto loaded. Also FCP and Photoshop

How many page outs do you get, 8 gig RAM owners? ;)

[eXan]

Mine's been up just shy of 9 days and has 72700 page outs compared with close to 300,000 page ins. Not too bad at all I don't think considering I've been doing some video encoding recently.

Actually video-editing apps usually take no more than 50-70 MB (my Final Cut Pro and iMovie), cuz they dont load video footage into the ram for the simple reason that video is very large in size and even 8 gigs of RAM will not be enough for it. So they use video from HD thats why HD speed is so important when rendering video

[Applespider]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?

Assume that you've taken the first obvious step to check that the extra RAM is being recognised and working?

[Chundles]

Actually video-editing apps usually take no more than 50-70 MB (my Final Cut Pro and iMovie), cuz they dont load video footage into the ram for the simple reason that video is very large in size and even 8 gigs of RAM will not be enough for it. So they use video from HD thats why HD speed is so important when rendering video

What about using Handbrake to convert DVD to H.264 .mp4 files?

Either way it's not too bad and much better than when I only had 256. I figure that when I start to crave an intelBook I'll just pull out the 256MB stick and bung in a 1GB stick - would've doone it earlier but only just had the $$$ for the 256. Still made a big difference though.

[meanmachine]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?

Page in/outs will jump as soon as you switch users. Restart your PB, see that page in/out is 0/0, then do a user switch and start as the new user some programs and then switch back to the first user. Now recheck the page in/out : there you have it.

:cool:

[minimax]

Does anybody know where to check for pageouts in Win XP ?
When I check Windows Task Manager > Performance it says under Kernel Memory: Paged: xxx Nonpaged: YYY
I guess nonpaged means HD used?

[PBG4]

i have now 1.5 GB and my kernel_task have 43 threads and uses 143.77MB real and 1.05BG VSIZE
is that right? i only have 400MB free while only having limwire, ichat,safari, and firefox open...

[Sun Baked]

I just got a new 1.67 GHz powerbook, threw in a gig and a half of ram, and I still have pageouts! Just checked Activity moniter, over 100k! Am not doing anything particularly strenuous...what gives?Uptime affects pageouts, the check to see if you need more memory is to restart the machine and do your normal task during a single session to see if you are getting an abnormal amount of pageouts during your normal workload.

Keeping all your applications open and having a extended uptime will incur a heavy toll on the pageouts -- and applications with memory leaks will really mess things up.

You need enough memory to run foreground applications and normal background task without resorting to VM and you should fine -- if the VM manager spins a background app to the HD when not in use, it'll just mean a seconds of lag when you bring it to the front.

[Vinnie_vw]

Yes we could. However, just go over to Wikipedia and look at their artcle on paging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging).
That page is not very informative. This page (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20010613140025184) and this page (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html) are more OS X specific.

So after nearly 2 days uptime on my iBook 12" with 1 gig Ram, I have 60,212 pageins and only 512 pageouts. I guess that's pretty good. But what I do find worrying is the 146,000,000 page faults? Since I have no reference point, is that number normal? I do have to mention that I have recently set up a seperate Swap partition (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040716153639236) with very good results, performance-wise.

[howesey]

My iMac with the standard 512MBs of RAM has had 244020/0 pageouts/ins in 20 mins of being booted. 34MBs of RAM free. I need more RAM, I only have Firefox running (zero widgets as I run out of RAM then). Grr, Mac OS X is so memory hungry, you can get WinXP to boot on 45MB of RAM used.

[Gokhan]

weell my ti has 24032 page in but 0 PAGE OUTS really its true
look

[cwright]

Well my G5 shows 75658/1617 for Page ins/outs, and I have 2.5 GB RAM and rebooted yesterday. Doesn't that seem a little high? :confused:

[electronboy]

Where do you see your number of pageouts?

You can also see them after you run the top command in Terminal.

[g0gie]

OSX is natorious for using ram, even if you have 2gigs of it, it will eat it all. Every comp using OSX will ahve lots of page ins/outs , i expect even if you had 16GB's of ram like on teh new quads :X

[bousozoku]

I've not been having a whole lot of luck with free RAM and all, but since 10.4.3 performance has been great and probably, better than anything prior version of Mac OS X.

While I can't put anything else into it, other than a faster hard drive, I think I'll be satisfied with the performance of my 3 year old machine. :) Thanks, Apple!

[PBG4]

my screen shot......
just recently upgraded to 1.5GB... wanna know if everything is running right!
93008 page in/3098 page out

[mikesjo]

What are you guys running with 1.5GB of ram where over 1GB is used up?!

Makes me think twice about buying a 512 stick and instead a 1gb stick :(.

[MacRumorUser]

My PB had 1.5gig ram and activity monitor is reporting

Page ins/outs: 52531/0

I'm quite impressed (though I havent done much with it over the last 36 hours - internet, email, word, itunes)... :)

[frenetic]

In my experience the biggest user of ram is bit torrent (limewire also, but to a lesser extent). Doing just the normal word processing, itunes, safari, mail.app I never use all of my 1.5 gb memory. However, as soon as I have bit torrent open ram use increases (more specifically, the blue inactive memory dramatically increases), and after a day or so it will lead to page outs.

I have noticed that running the periodic weekly command in the terminal releases this inactive memory.

That being said, I would not worry too much about ram usage by applications. What is the use of having 1.5 gig if your computer does not make use of it?

[e²Studios]

I have 1GB of RAM on my Mini and i still get Page outs. This is after 23 Days of uptime. To be honest I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but i really dont feel a performance hit like i did when i only had 512mb of RAM.

Ed

[RedTomato]

I 'm not that keen on Activity manager - I prefer to use the 'top' command in a Terminal window. It looks more geeky :) and is also less distracting.

However, large amounts of the 'top' display, I don't understand at all :(

I've searched for a full guide to the info displayed by 'top' but can't find it anywhere :(

Can you point me to any references? I have a full knowledge of how virtual memory works, but I'm finding it hard to relate that to the info given by 'top'. ('man top' is a little help, but more info would be nic)

e.g. what does 'wired' mean, what do the numbers in brackets mean etc?

Many thanks,

.. RedTomato ..

[dcv]

I have 1GB of RAM on my Mini and i still get Page outs. This is after 23 Days of uptime.

This makes quite interesting reading... my PowerBook has been up for 23 days as well. I've got 1.25GB RAM and I'm getting HUGE amounts of pageouts... don't really know what this means, but these numbers can't be good can they? :confused:

[Vinnie_vw]

I have 1GB of RAM on my Mini and i still get Page outs. This is after 23 Days of uptime. To be honest I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but i really dont feel a performance hit like i did when i only had 512mb of RAM.

Ed

It seems to me that safari is using a lot of ram with 190 mb. Pageouts mean that part of the memory used is written to the harddrive. Perhaps that's typical of browser-behaviour with cookies and such?

[Vinnie_vw]

I 'm not that keen on Activity manager - I prefer to use the 'top' command in a Terminal window. It looks more geeky :) and is also less distracting.

However, large amounts of the 'top' display, I don't understand at all :(

I've searched for a full guide to the info displayed by 'top' but can't find it anywhere :(

Can you point me to any references? I have a full knowledge of how virtual memory works, but I'm finding it hard to relate that to the info given by 'top'. ('man top' is a little help, but more info would be nic)

e.g. what does 'wired' mean, what do the numbers in brackets mean etc?

Many thanks,

.. RedTomato ..

I think I pointed to some apple-specific memory-related sites in one of the posts on page 1 of this thread. I found a lot through google, I would try searching for terms you find in Top there. Bit too late for me in the evening to do so, sorry!