Page ins/outs; is this ok or not?

[Temujin]

I've heard people talking about how page outs are bad, mmmkay.
I've recently added 1 gig of ram to get more speed and was under the impression that doing so would eliminate page outs too. Don't get me wrong adding the extra ram reduced the number of page outs significantly, but didn't eliminate them as I assumed it would.

My MBP has been running for about five days now and Activity Monitor tells me that I've had 48623 page ins and 1366 page outs.

Is the 1366 ok and acceptable and not that big a deal I'm making it out to be?

Thanks

[Deepdale]

My MBP has been running for about five days now and Activity Monitor tells me that I've had 48623 page ins and 1366 page outs.

Is the 1366 ok and acceptable and not that big a deal I'm making it out to be?

I have seen others with numbers far exceeding yours. It does not seem that those are unusually excessive.

[mad jew]

After five days, that's absolutely fine. :)

Are you noticing less beachballs?

[Temujin]

Thanks guys.

Yeah don't see that many beachballs anymore. But still comes and kill the joy once in a while.

[Temujin]

An additional question

When checking System Memory in Activity Monitor I'm being told that I've have 42 MB of free ram left.

Wired: 111
Active: 361
Inactive: 1017

So do I actually have 1059 MB left (free + inactive), or am I missing something?

[mad jew]

Include Inactive RAM with Free RAM to determine how much RAM you have available. It's just the way OSX works, so yes, you do have about 1059MB available to you (free). :)

[Coheebuzz]

Can anyone please explain what Page ins/outs are? :)

I have 63808 ins and 0 outs on my G5 after about 6 hours of Photoshop use.

Thanks!

[Temujin]

Include Inactive RAM with Free RAM to determine how much RAM you have available. It's just the way OSX works, so yes, you do have about 1059MB available to you (free). :)
Thanks again


Can't help you there Coheebuzz, just know page outs are bad mmmkay

[mad jew]

Coheebuzz, page ins and page outs are transfers of data (I think it's measured in packets) between the RAM and the hard drive. The actual amount is unimportant, but rather the rate of accumulation is. If you're getting a lot of both of them in a short amount of time, then you would probably benefit from a RAM upgrade. :)

[Coheebuzz]

Coheebuzz, page ins and page outs are transfers of data (I think it's measured in packets) between the RAM and the hard drive. The actual amount is unimportant, but rather the rate of accumulation is. If you're getting a lot of both of them in a short amount of time, then you would probably benefit from a RAM upgrade. :)

Thanks for the quick reply! So the outs are the amount of data transfered on the hard drive, as in Virtual Memory when RAM is low?

[mad jew]

I always get the two confused, but yeah, I think that makes sense. Paging is an aspect of Virtual Memory. :)

[VoodooDaddy]

1366 after 5 days?? How much ram do you have total after the 1g install?

My mini duo with stock 512mb does 100,000 page outs+ per day. *face_plain*

I'm gonna drop 1gb stick in very soon and leave in one of the 256mb sticks. Hoping to see a large improvement.

[mad jew]

Yeah, with Rosetta, Intel Macs should really have 1GB plus of RAM. :)

[Temujin]

1366 after 5 days?? How much ram do you have total after the 1g install?

My mini duo with stock 512mb does 100,000 page outs+ per day. *face_plain*

I'm gonna drop 1gb stick in very soon and leave in one of the 256mb sticks. Hoping to see a large improvement.
A total of 1,5 gig. 100,000 :eek: seems rather high IMO.

[VoodooDaddy]

A total of 1,5 gig. 100,000 :eek: seems rather high IMO.

You're telling me. And that's with nothing more than running Firefox, iTunes, Mail, iPhoto, Safari, iCal, basic rudimentary apps. Nothing like Photoshop or video editing or anything graphic intense.

It goes without saying I was definitely disappointed with the performance of the mini. I know, I know, "upgrade the ram, 512 isn't enough." My 3yr old pc with 256mb ram ran as fast or faster than the stock mini. With 512mb the pc runs circles around the mini.

The mini does have some advantages: size (or lack of size), quiet as a mouse, start up/shut down much faster. But my case isn't your typically new mac user falling madly in love with their machine and swearing never to buy another pc. This was really more experimental than anything, to see how it I'd like using a mac and the OS.

[mad jew]

Give it another chance once you've upgraded the RAM. It should make a massive difference. :)

[Passante]

I was under the impression that page outs was the number to watch to see if more ram was needed. My page outs dropped to zero after I increased memory from 768-1.25 gig in my G4 powerbook.

[mad jew]

It's all about the cost benefit ratio. Excess RAM does no harm, but it does no good either, and it's money that could be spent on something else. The aim should not be to eliminate page outs entirely, but to find the optimum amount of RAM that will ensure the minimum amount of slowdown/beachballing for the minimum cost.

Also, outright page ins/outs mean nothing without referring to the amount of time it took to accumulate them. It's the rate that these stack up, not the actual amount that matters. :)

[topgunn]

Try this. Check your page-outs. Put your computer to sleep. Wake your computer up. Check your page-outs again. You will notice an increase.

Even if you never come close to using all of your RAM, you will typically still accumulate some page-outs.

[savar]

(I think it's measured in packets)

Hmm..I think it's measured in...."pages".

[NtotheIzoo]

Hmm..I think it's measured in...."pages".

That actually made me lol...My powerbook G4 w/ 1.25 gigs of ram has 391500/16621...it's been running for just about a week now, though...i wouldnt worry too much about page in/outs unless you get a lot of beachballs or it takes a while to load apps...imo

[thumb]

can anything be done to improve pages out other than more RAM?

I have a .867 GHX tibook with maxed out RAM at 1 GB. Uptime is just a few days, and my pages in/out are 250000/380000.

it has been used intensively in this time, i should add. and i do get a fair amount of beachballs with safari. and yes, i know 'get a mbp' is the best answer, and i will, i promise. just not right now.

cheers

thumb

[IJ Reilly]

I was under the impression that page outs was the number to watch to see if more ram was needed. My page outs dropped to zero after I increased memory from 768-1.25 gig in my G4 powerbook.

The ratio of page outs to page ins, really. If you see 70,000 page ins and 2,000 page outs, I doubt you'd be noticing any performance issues. It seems most people do notice when the numbers become roughly equal.

[IJ Reilly]

can anything be done to improve pages out other than more RAM?

Quitting applications and closing windows that you aren't using. Rebooting also deletes the vm swap files.

[QCassidy352]

My MBP has been running for about five days now and Activity Monitor tells me that I've had 48623 page ins and 1366 page outs.

Is the 1366 ok and acceptable and not that big a deal I'm making it out to be?

Those numbers are totally fine! :)

100,000+ per day is not fine! :eek: More RAM will make quite a big difference there!!

[nutmac]

First, Apple's explanation: Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918)

In short, both inactive and free memory represent the amount of physical memory (a.k.a., RAM) available to applications. Inactive differs from free in that Mac OS X is keeping it as a cache memory (i.e., instead of reloading data from the disk, it will be immediately available). In other words, Mac OS X prefers to keep unused memory as inactive than free. OS is supposed to reclaim inactive as free when free is all used up.

In practice, this reclaim process does not happen consistently/quickly enough. And the result is page out -- when OS cannot allocate free memory or reallocate inactive memory for application, it borrows memory from disk in the form of virtual memory (found on /var/vm directory). Disk is obviously many times slower than memory. So when data is accessed from memory, particularly when OS needs to expand virtual memory (by default, it will pre-allocate about 70 MB of disk space for virtual memory), you will experience infamous Mac OS X phenomenon called "beach balling."

Even with plenty of RAM, say 2 GB or more, it's all too common to experience some amounts of page out. The next version of Mac OS X is rumored to feature more advanced garbage collection framework, so perhaps beach balling will become less prevalent phenomenon. In the mean time, if you have lots of swap files under /var/vm (and very high page out count), you will benefit from more RAM.