virtual memory

[Toby Goodbar]

my computer seemed a little sluggish last night. so i opened up activity monitor for the first time in leopard, and my virtual memory size was 43.1gb!!

after closing everything down for the night and opening and checking in the morning with nothing but mail, vlc (inactive), and transmission running, virtual memory is 41.14!

is this NORMAL? if it is, normal for leopard, or normal for osx? i don't remember vm ever being that big in tiger....

 

[Eidorian]

How much RAM do you have? What about Page Outs?

I have 4 GB of RAM and 47 GB "allocated" to virtual memory.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

How much RAM do you have? What about Page Outs?

I have 4 GB of RAM and 47 GB "allocated" to virtual memory.

1gb ram like it says in my sig box and.. page outs is reading 2.5 right now. apps open: firefox, mail, vlc, transmission, and of course activity monitor

 

[hughvane]

Leopard is a hungry beast compared with Tiger, but that level of VM does seem rather high. Try quitting things like VLC, even though it is inactive. I seldom use Transmission, but did open it for the test, nothing major there. Even FFox is under 100 Mb of VM.

So, is VM working on something in the background? Only you can analyse what might be going on. Maybe a good going-over with Onyx might tune the system and restore things to what they should be.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

Leopard is a hungry beast compared with Tiger, but that level of VM does seem rather high. Try quitting things like VLC, even though it is inactive. I seldom use Transmission, but did open it for the test, nothing major there. Even FFox is under 100 Mb of VM.

So, is VM working on something in the background? Only you can analyse what might be going on. Maybe a good going-over with Onyx might tune the system and restore things to what they should be.

well, i counted up all processes and virtual memory used, theres 25 with NOTHING over a gb (well theres a couple 1.2ish) even round everything to the nearest gb vm used, that leaves 15gb memory unaccounted for. right now its not acting sluggish or anything. but i'm just wondering if it was normal. but now that you got me investigating, it seems really strange its using that much... starting to wonder...

 

[hughvane]

well, i counted up all processes and virtual memory used, ... that leaves 15gb memory unaccounted for. right now its not acting sluggish or anything. but i'm just wondering if it was normal. but now that you got me investigating, it seems really strange its using that much.

I was going to include in my previous post that you're asking a lot of the G4 with Leopard. Yes, I know, there are users numerous who say "it's working great for me", but the designers of Leopard were not thinking of the limitations of a G4 processor, even the DP model.

I see from Mactracker that you can go to 1.5 Gb maximum RAM in your model of G4, maybe the extra 512 would help.

Next thought: something in the recesses of my memory prompts me that there was an issue with screen refresh activity, but that (I think) was when graphics-intensive software was in use.

I'd still recommend giving the OS a good cleanup with Onyx. It really does make a difference, especially if it hasn't been used before or for a lengthy period.

I must say I'm impressed with the use you're putting that G4 to with 3 internal drives. I've long argued that different OS on different drives was a better way to go than partitioning on just one drive.

I'd be interested to know how the G4 performs (Activity Monitor) if you boot from the Tiger drive.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

well, i'm one of the numerous users who say "its working great for me". i would even say that my fresh leopard install is faster than my old "dirty" install of tiger. i wasn't sure if i wanted to make the switch to leopard or not or how it would function on my powermac so this seemed the best way to find out. slowly i find myself using the leopard side more and more. i hate what they did to spotlight though. networking is alot better IMO. i really havent noticed any slowdowns that wouldn't occur in tiger. everything so far has run pretty smooth.


i agree i WOULD like to have that extra 512mb ram.i say the more the better. ive heard rumours that you can actually put 2gb ram but only 1.5 is published. i may get the 1gb stick and find out. i'm pretty sure it will work even if it only utilizes 1.5 anyway.

i cant really speak on the graphics slowdown becuase i don't do any gaming, and movies hasn't been a problem. with that said, i also have 2 graphics cards one being a 128mb ati radeon that drives my second display at 480x800 (or something like that) which is my tv. which is GREAT for watching movies or putting itunes or music apps over there to free up my workspace. sometimes i put visualizer on, but no problems yet....

onyx, i tried with tiger but didn't notice any difference. what exactly should i be doing with it? maybe i'm using it wrong?? so i havent bothered to install it on my leopard drive, esepcially being fresh install n all. what would you say onyx does for YOU?

i'll keep you posted on tigers activity monitor when i get a chance to boot into tiger.

 

[hughvane]

Onyx, i tried with tiger but didn't notice any difference. what exactly should i be doing with it? maybe i'm using it wrong?? so i havent bothered to install it on my leopard drive, esepcially being fresh install n all. what would you say onyx does for YOU?

I use it to:
1. Repair permissions
2. Run maintenance scripts
3. Clear caches
4. Optimise the system (update)
You can do a complete optimisation if you choose, but some (not I) say it's risky. It takes a very long time if you go the 'complete' way.

After using Onyx, my Tiger OS runs more smoothly, goes through its actions slightly more quickly, but it would be dishonest of me to say that it makes a huge difference. That is due in part to the fact that I keep my computer fairly tidy anyway.

Other thoughts:
1. what's the state of your Trash?
2. what do you have Spotlight set to do on startup (which would only affect startup time)?
3. what are the other two drives doing while you're operating from your 150/Leopard?

 

[Toby Goodbar]

I use it to:
1. Repair permissions
2. Run maintenance scripts
3. Clear caches
4. Optimise the system (update)
You can do a complete optimisation if you choose, but some (not I) say it's risky. It takes a very long time if you go the 'complete' way.

After using Onyx, my Tiger OS runs more smoothly, goes through its actions slightly more quickly, but it would be dishonest of me to say that it makes a huge difference. That is due in part to the fact that I keep my computer fairly tidy anyway.

Other thoughts:
1. what's the state of your Trash?
2. what do you have Spotlight set to do on startup (which would only affect startup time)?
3. what are the other two drives doing while you're operating from your 150/Leopard?

my trash is usually empty. i regularly repair permissions myself. but what do the maintenance scripts do? anything out of the ordinary or jus what you tell it to do? i was under the impression osx did stuff like that on its own automatically when it wasnt being used like defrag HDs, stuff like that..

my tiger drive seems to interact with the leopard drive unless i eject it. wierd i know. for example if i run firefox3 on leopard it will show me "pre typed" stuff from tiger AND leopard. for the most part it sits idle though. i'm slowly manually migrating apps and things over. trying to filter out what i still use/need and don't. i transferred the majority of documents, all my movies and music to my external hard drive so that i can have easy access from both sides or i can take media with me when i visit home for the holidays. its a usb drive until i get a sata controller card. you definately notice the access rate time difference from the IDEs. ive also kept tiger around because i use it to run windowsXP. lol yea i know, i got EVERYTHING but linux on this thing. i need winxp for the occasional unsupported program like the ones at my aviation school. and on occasion if its worth the system slowdown i'll leave it on to use utorrent. (don't get me started on the utorrent thing lol)

my beef with spotlight is that its too "protected" in leopard. when i delete an app, i DELETE AN APP which means finding its plist or anything else.. i hated that about windows. leaving files here and there. which by themselves aren't big, but over time.... anyway spotlight won't scan system folders. so if i have a really cool hi-res nature picture to add to the default wallpaper folder, or i'm looking for a prefernce plist file, etc i have to manually look for them. it needs an option to turn that on or off. i don't want to mess with search options everytime. my other beef is i jus don't like the "finder" version of spotlight's "show all". i liked the old spotlight window better with the "info" icon to see where the file resides if needed. i suppose leopard still has tweaking and if enough people complain, apple will do something about it. apples a really great company like that.

 

[hughvane]

Even though I'm still using Tiger, and will continue to do so, I abandoned Spotlight some time ago in favour of the Finder > Cmd-F. It does a more thorough job and I find the interface better.

I use CleanApp to delete applications because it searches out those hidden or obscure files. Yes, it is an irritant to find dregs of an app left behind.

My question about the other hard drives, and what they're doing when the computer is in operation, was directed toward Activity Monitor and what VM might be allocated by OS X in monitoring those other drives.

With my G3, I've never tried unmounting the OS 9 drive. I do get a bit scratchy about the time lag when the computer is coming out of sleep and I have to wait for the second (smaller) drive to spin up.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

writing to you from tiger now,

my virtual memory is averaging 10gb.

when i had ejected my tiger drive while booted into leopard, i noticed the virtual memory only dropped by about a gb. it looks like that might be the standard, around 40, idk. but that seems pretty ridiculous to me.....

now that i'm back in tiger it seems like its running faster than leopard since it has lost its "freshness". im going to boot back in to leopard a little later and see. i still haven't repaired permissions or anything to see if that has anything to do with it. the last couple times i was going to, it seemed like it was going to take ALOT longer than it does with tiger....

 

[richard.mac]

please search! this is a bug. add a non default column to Activity Monitor by right clicking on the column titles and it will go back to around 7 GB.

however, yes Leopard does use a little more RAM as Active than Tiger.

 

[Toby Goodbar]

please search! this is a bug. add a non default column to Activity Monitor by right clicking on the column titles and it will go back to around 7 GB.

however, yes Leopard does use a little more RAM as Active than Tiger.

i assume its a display bug then? (as opposed to it actually using 40gigs vm)
i'll try n give this a shot once i'm back in leopard. i have to do this EVERY time or just once?

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

I think I have a thread about this somewhere too. My VM is supposedly high but for some reason when I open up Activity Monitor, it displays correct VM usage and then 1/2 second later they all get inflated to some outrageous numbers. I was able to get a screen shot of the before and after.

I know it's definantly false because how can I have 39GB of VM when my HDD is at like 95% capacity on an 80gb drive . I think this happened when I updated to 10.5.5?

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