large page outs

But what are your page ins?

brijazz said:

Currently at 5.54GB. Shouldn't page-outs be less than page-ins by a significant margin?

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Yeah they should be, especially with 8gb of RAM.
Go into Activity Monitor and see what apps/processes are sucking up buckets of RAM?

Wow, I needed RAM, and my page in to page out ratio was at 4:1, now with more RAM it's at about 30:1. Can't believe yours is 1:1!

open terminal an type in
vm_stat

post the result. A Browser like Chrome or FF can suck huge amounts of RAM but 1.15GB is nothing. My Chrome currently eats 3GB at the moment.
Try Opera that one has a limit and is much more memory efficient with huge amounts of tabs because it doesn't spawn an entier process per tab.

brijazz said:

My MacBook Pro (2.4GHz i5, mid-2010) has 8GB of memory installed. My current uptime is 12 days, and I have a huge page out of 5.45 GB.

This is pretty typical of my machine; why is the page out so big when I have 8GB of memory? Standard usage for me involves running Firefox, MS Office, Mail, iTunes, Cyberduck, Keynote and occasionally Handbrake.

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In activity monitor, what is the "Swap used" amount. - it's best to check this when your system is busiest.

Are you noticing any sluggishness? If so under what conditions.

brijazz said:

...
Swap is 1.89GB. As for sluggishness, I get beach balls at seemingly random times... could be when poking around in Finder, could be when browsing via Firefox.

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Something is chewing through memory. Gave you checked system process sizes or just your processes?

For example, on my system, the kernel is using about 700MB - all other system processes are under 100MB each.

And is your kernel running in 32 or 64 bit? By default I think your system uses the 32bit kernel. You might want to try the 64bit kernel and see if that helps.

It does look like you could use more ram than you have. Although do try the 64bit kernel first if aren't running it.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Squashy said:

But what are your page ins?

Click to expand...

brijazz said:

Currently at 5.54GB. Shouldn't page-outs be less than page-ins by a significant margin?

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There is no meaningful correlation between page outs and page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may not ever have page outs. Also, you can run for weeks or months, accumulating page ins, then go through a period of intense activity for only a few minutes which produces page outs. No ratio between the two is useful. The only thing that indicates a need for more RAM is the presence of significant page outs during normal workload, regardless of the page ins.

brijazz said:

What I really want to figure out is *why* my page outs are so high (as per my original post). Is there a log that keeps track of paging activity on an app-by-app basis?

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No, but you can use Activity Monitor to track current memory usage by apps. Be sure to change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Also, be sure you've restarted your computer, to reset page outs to zero.

brijazz said:

1) Firefox - 1.15GB
2) Keynote - 238MB
3) then six few others between 100-200MB, then moving down from there

I'm sure I can trim down Firefox if need be (by disabling extensions, etc.), but nothing seems to be running amok... that's why I'm so perplexed. I'd assumed that 8GB is enough, given that it's the maximum amount supported by my machine!

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Actually you can put an unofficial max of 16GB of RAM I suggest you get that.

According to your mem stats there is just some process that has lots of data it doesn't need currently and it pages it out. I had that with a certain server instance I ran.
It doesn't actually affect performance. There are next to no hits with 12 days up time. You hardly ever change anything because otherwise you'd have much more page ins. There is no swapping. I cannot see any indication that you could benefit at all for more RAM.
With the small swap it looks like some stuff was page out and later forgotten. As in you closed the app or the app freed the ram that was in the swap file. It never moved back to the RAM. Your page ins are so low they hardly cover the stuff you currently hold in ram.

I have also 12 days up time
but 186GB page ins. 10 GB page outs 3 GB swap and I use about 1 GB more RAM than you out of my 8GB currently. The 3GB swap only show when I launch the VM and some other stuff but it doesn't really hinder performance. Most of the RAM takes Chrome with too many tabs open. I leave them because I want later but if they are swapped or not I hardly notice a difference when I reopen a window after a long time not checking it.

I don't see any indication that more RAM would help or that you could experience any noticeable performance problems but the pagein/out ratio seems odd. I would monitor that. 12 days up and so little page ins? Did you just launch everything once and that was it? Even just watching youtube should gather page ins. What did you do 12 days? Only those apps?

macbook pro i5 said:

Actually you can put an unofficial max of 16GB of RAM I suggest you get that.

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He doesn't need 16 GB of RAM for what he states he's using his MBP for.

OP: I suggest you do what GGJstudios suggested and restart your computer. Report back if your page outs go back up to the same level.

FYI, my page outs are 3.2 MB with 8 GB of memory after days of use.

brijazz said:

I've already rebooted. Sitting at zero (of course), and will monitor carefully. I went through the reboot/monitor process about 2 weeks ago, and ended up with the same result. Hopefully you won't hear from me again, but I'm skeptical

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Try to keep some sort of log of what apps you're using as well. I use all the apps you use regularly (except handbrake), so why this would happen is puzzling.

brijazz said:

Sure, only about $1000 and up! Doesn't apply to my model anyhow (Macbook 6,2).

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actually it is 200-300 NZ dollars now and yes I realize it wont work with your mac I assumed it was the 2011 model my bad