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

[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.

That page is not very informative. This page and this page 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 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]

k

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?

 

[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 .

 

[MRU]

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?

 

[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!