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BiikeMike

macrumors 65816
Original poster
So, I got my Mac Pro home Monday night. Ordered the new RAM today, should be here tomorrow.
 

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This is how my system has lived since November. Its only been turned on for an hour or soo too....
 

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Um i Have never seen a single page out on the G5 and ever since upgrading to 2gb on the MBP its always a 0 page outs too.

And I use my computers, hard. video editing/rendering/encoding, graphics work, WoW.
 
This is how my system has lived since November. Its only been turned on for an hour or soo too....

holy fack!

I took my screenshot after a reboot, and before the reboot I was running at 80,000/160,000, but you, you are just.... we need to start a collection plate "RAM for Trainguy!"

you really have been running it like that since November? What do you do?
 
holy fack!

I took my screenshot after a reboot, and before the reboot I was running at 80,000/160,000, but you, you are just.... we need to start a collection plate "RAM for Trainguy!"

you really have been running it like that since November? What do you do?

I am high school student....or do you meant what do i do with the computer. Just lots of multi-tasking. I am going to see how high it gets after a couple days. As normally i just put it too sleep when i don't use it. So at the end of this week I will look at that number. 😉 How about you guys lay bets of what it will be at....loser buys me RAM. 🙄 RAM is my top priority right now....but money is in short supply.
 
Here's mine. I restarted earlier in the day to clear-up the page ins/outs and to free up some ram.

It gets much higher after using graphic applications and going w/o a restart for several days.
 

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I am high school student.... RAM is my top priority right now....but money is in short supply.

Surely you can scrape together $130 for an extra gig? Are your parents that cruel? To heck with them -- just get a pt job for a couple weeks and you'll be all set.
 
In most cases, your computer will page out when you run out of memory. When this happens, your computer will off-load some information in memory to the hard drive. The significance of this is that your computer goes from using one of the fastest components of your computer (memory) to the absolute slowest component (your hard drive). When this happens, you are likely to see the spinning beachball or experiences stutters in your performance.

Page ins are the opposite. It is reading information into memory. This is supposed to happen. For example, when you turn on your computer, the operating system is loaded into memory from the hard drive. These packets show up as page ins. It is impossible to say what number of page outs are bad. You may have 500,000 page outs after 2 weeks or after 2 hours. One may be acceptable and the other is certainly not. A general rule of thumb is to look at the ratio betweeen the page ins and outs. Personally, I don't want any page outs so if I am running on 1GB and I have a 3:1 ratio, I will buy more RAM. But, for most people, if you have less than a 2:1 ratio, you should probably consider getting more RAM.

Also note that your computer "pages out" when you put your computer to sleep. Basically, it writes out the information in memory to the hard drive to save power and then loads it back in when it wakes up. Try this. Check your page outs before putting your computer to sleep and then check them again after waking it up from sleep. So, if you are the type of user who is frequently putting your computer to sleep, your number of page outs is going to be inflated. Don't interpret this to mean that you are short on memory.

A good test to see if you need more RAM would be to do a clean restart of your system thus clearing out the page in/out information and then open up all of the programs that you would typically have open at the same time and do a few tasks with these apps that would constitute normal activity. Now, go and check your page outs. If you have more than a couple thousand, you probably don't have enough RAM.
 
Thanks for making me a little less ignorant chaps! I'll check mine when I go home. I suspect it will be a pretty decent ratio for me as I just upgraded to 2.5GB of memory from 1GB that I had before and since this change I have yet to receive a visit from Mr Beachball 🙂
 
regularly checking my activity monitor has never revealed any page outs at all.

iMac G5 with 2gb Ram.

We run Illustrator, Photoshop, Bryce, Quark etc...

That many Page outs will kill your hard drive in no time...
 
Well I think I'm okay then. This is after 15 days of uptime running Folding @ Home 24/7. Of course I do other things on the computer but... yeah.

2ghz quad Mac Pro, 2gb ram. Wheee.
 
Well here is mine. I know I clearly qualify for more ram. I mean after all, i'll run iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Photoshop, Firefox and MSN sometimes at the same time. I just don't want to put anymore money into this iMac g4 because if I get a new one, this 512mb of ram will be plenty for what i would do on it. It hadn't been shutdown for at least a week.

edit: Heres another question, why is it you can have page outs when you still have over 100mb of inactive memory? Why doesn't it want to use it sometimes?
 

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Um i Have never seen a single page out on the G5 and ever since upgrading to 2gb on the MBP its always a 0 page outs too.

And I use my computers, hard. video editing/rendering/encoding, graphics work, WoW.

Strange. You think it would, I was getting 5xxxxx to 8xxxxxx pages outs with heavy texture work with 2GB, several hundreds of layers/effects 1920x1920 ranging from 150 to 300 meg psds. Ever since getting ram well over 4gig has been great for my stuff. 0 page outs now, even time saving and opening files, it was murder for me waiting several minutes. Now those files open from 30 to 60 seconds.
 
Surely you can scrape together $130 for an extra gig? Are your parents that cruel? To heck with them -- just get a pt job for a couple weeks and you'll be all set.

The price is $299 in canada from the local guys. Anyone else found a cheaper price after shipping in cdn dollars? Some places charge $80 for shipping and by the time you stick that in plus custom charges its more expensive.
 
The price is $299 in canada from the local guys. Anyone else found a cheaper price after shipping in cdn dollars? Some places charge $80 for shipping and by the time you stick that in plus custom charges its more expensive.

Ahem.... you might be be well to check again -- you can figure out where...

Biike: the thing isn't the absolute numbers of pageouts, but the ratio of ins to outs. You want outs to be about 10% of ins or lower, 5% or lower is great.


Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com
 
I tend to push my system, torrenting, safari, audio/video re-encoding, parallels etc. So i seldom have zero pageouts BUT i rarely "choke" either as RAM is usually freed up after each task without needing a restart.

picture1ia6.png
 
Ahem.... you might be be well to check again -- you can figure out where...

Biike: the thing isn't the absolute numbers of pageouts, but the ratio of ins to outs. You want outs to be about 10% of ins or lower, 5% or lower is great.


Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

haha so my ratio is REALLY bad in my last screen shot......now its up too 212782/419096
 
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