15" retina with 16gb ram and page outs?

[nickandre21]

Hey guys i have the top of the line 15" retina, I basically use it for video,graphics and music production. While buying I thought that 16gb would be good for a long time, but of late I have been running into lots of page outs.
What would be a better way to tackle this situation it gets a bit laggy however.

 

[thundersteele]

Page outs are marginal and shouldn't affect your performance very much.

Btw, it might be more useful if you would post the screenshot with the Apps sorted by memory use. With the current screenshot there is only one App using a significant amount of RAM (Final Cut Pro).

 

[johnnnw]

Yeah, when you get that situation again click the Real Mem tab instead and post a screenshot.

And to the guy above although the page outs seem marginal who knows how quick that happened and the fact that he has so little mem free means he would definitely be experiencing slow downs. Happens to be all the time when I get around 40MB free.

 

[nickandre21]

well heres one i screen grabbed right now.

 

[throAU]

page outs aren't necessarily bad.

if there is application data in RAM that is doing NOTHING, it's quite likely that the idle ram consumed by the data in question is better used for cache (i.e., it is returned to the "inactive" pool

if the data is needed again (i.e., it becomes active), it is in inactive anyway. if the ram is needed for something else, the data is already on disk/ssd and can just be dumped from inactive RAM and IMMEDIATELY re-allocated. i.e., the OS pre-emptively pages out idle things in advance so it can allocate memory faster if required - it doesn't need to wait for an allocation it can't fulfil, THEN page out and THEN allocate... if the paging is already done, it just re-allocates immediately.


TLDR: stop watching activity monitor, use the mac, and only go looking for problems when you actually have a performance issue, not just some number looking not to your liking on activity monitor.

RAM allocation strategy is a lot more complex these days than "use ram until you run out then swap".

 

[johnnnw]

well heres one i screen grabbed right now.
View attachment 426884

You sorted it the wrong way.

Click Real Mem again.

You want the biggest users at the top of the list, you have it smallest to largest.

Next time when you have as little free ram as you did in the first screenshot sort is the other way so the biggest ram users show in the top.

----------

TLDR: stop watching activity monitor, use the mac, and only go looking for problems when you actually have a performance issue, not just some number looking not to your liking on activity monitor.

Don't know if you read the first post or not, but he's clearly running out of free RAM in the first screenshot.

He said he's experiencing laggyness, which is understandable considering how little free RAM there is.

So he is experiencing performance issues, his concern is not just from "watching the activity monitor"...

 

[Idefix]

page outs are no big deal. just do a restart. get some coffee...or tea...

isn't a quick restart one of the selling points of SSD?

 

[Brandon263]

Don't know if you read the first post or not, but he's clearly running out of free RAM in the first screenshot.

He said he's experiencing laggyness, which is understandable considering how little free RAM there is.

So he is experiencing performance issues, his concern is not just from "watching the activity monitor"...

Don't know if you read the first post or not, but he's clearly running out of free RAM in the first screenshot.

He said he's experiencing laggyness, which is understandable considering how little free RAM there is.

So he is experiencing performance issues, his concern is not just from "watching the activity monitor"...

The page outs are not necessarily the reason behind the lagginess/perfomance issues. For reference, look at my page outs below on my Air.

I only have 4 GB of RAM and am using the laptop with a Thunderbolt Display, yet in spite of the significant page outs, I have no laginness whatsoever. However, when I use my rMBP when its not connected to the display, I start experiencing noticeable lag (there are no issues when the rMBP is connected to the TBD). I suspect the issues have to do with driving the display of the rMBP. Hopefully this will be fixed with Mavericks.

 

[nickandre21]

well yeah a quick restart solves it, but when you working on a video or sound you kind of love to be undisturbed.
I find the laggyness while carrying out my edits its minimal.

I will do that the next time i face the issue for now I restarted and have only firefox with 4 tabs and itunes on shows 10.39 gb free

 

[niteflyr]

Might give "Free Memory" app a try. In the app store.

 

[nickandre21]

thanks i will give that a try and see if it benefits me when i face the issue once again.

 

[leman]

Or just type 'purge' into the Terminal, its the thing all those apps are running anyway... no reason to clutter your machine with pointless software

 

[ka-spot]

Nice.. My base Air 2011 has some page outs too..

[06/08/2013 22:38:40] $ uptime
22:38 up 112 days, 22:17, 2 users, load averages: 1.04 1.24 1.12

Still works pretty normal..

 

[johnjey]

Nice.. My base Air 2011 has some page outs too..

Image

[06/08/2013 22:38:40] $ uptime
22:38 up 112 days, 22:17, 2 users, load averages: 1.04 1.24 1.12

Still works pretty normal..

Well boys....why did the APple Genius bar boy looked at me as if i committed a crime, when i said oh i am gonna go with 16GB upgrade that you guys don't offer--> to which he said " thats over-spec and not recommended" huh !

 

[M5RahuL]

Or just type 'purge' into the Terminal, its the thing all those apps are running anyway... no reason to clutter your machine with pointless software

This !! No rebooting needed

 

[sofianito]

Lol. A $2000+ machine that needs to be pushed manually to free ram...

 

[jafingi]

Lol. A $2000+ machine that needs to be pushed manually to free ram...

Has nothing to do with the machine: it's OSX RAM management that needs some improvement.