4 GB is not enough (over 50 GB of Swap used)

[Weaselboy]

After restarting, resetting PRAM and SMC, repairing permissions and cleaning up the computer using Onyx, the computer is working fine. Although it is showing huge pageouts (~4GB), it nonetheless feels marginally faster than my rMBP 15 and there's no lag. The display actually doesn't look that bad either.

What are you doing there with VLC?? It shows it is using 16 exabytes of memory!! Are you ripping a video or something? That is your problem right there.

 

[Intell]

What are you doing there with VLC?? It shows it is using 16 exabytes of memory!! Are you ripping a video or something? That is your problem right there.

That would be 16EB of virtual memory. It's a bug with Activity Monitor or something else in Mac OS X. I often have a few processes that use that much virtual memory.

 

[tann]

Ive been running my 2011 MBA with 4gb of ram since launch and ive never had that warning come up or even close to that amount of swap used. There is defiantly an app or process playing up there. Why is mail using 1gb of memory lol??? Here is a screenshot of my activity monitor.

View attachment 419226

That Mavericks Activity Monitor is incredible sexy haha.

 

[Brandon263]

What display do you have, LG or Samsung?

I have the LG display. LP133WP1-TJA7. Looks amazing.

 

[HiDEF]

I have the LG display. LP133WP1-TJA7. Looks amazing.

Cool. Are you using any color profiles?

 

[Brandon263]

Cool. Are you using any color profiles?

No. I do use f.lux though, so that might be the reason it looks good to me.

 

[neiltc13]

Why does Mail need over 1GB RAM?

 

[mac82]

WTF? With just that? Something there has a fierce memory leak. The stuff you have there shouldn't even require 512mb ram lol.

After restarting, resetting PRAM and SMC, repairing permissions and cleaning up the computer using Onyx, the computer is working fine. Although it is showing huge pageouts (~4GB), it nonetheless feels marginally faster than my rMBP 15 and there's no lag. The display actually doesn't look that bad either.

You should definitely not be having that many page ins and page outs after restarting your machine. You shouldn't be having any with light to moderate use for several days of uptime, and then only moderate page ins and outs for several more days. You almost certainly have either a runaway application or a fault in the factory installation of OS X (it happens). Perhaps you should try reinstalling OS X, without installing any other software for several hours and see if you get any page outs in activity monitor. If not, install one application at a time, use it for a few hours, and watch activity monitor until you find the culprit. If, on the other hand, you see a lot of paging on a fresh installation of OS X before you even install any applications, then you may have a hardware problem and would benefit from a trip to the apple store.

 

[2IS]

An SSD with swap on it may be fast, but it is more limited in space than a regular hard drive. Your run away swap does sound like a leaking program.

I know. I was sarcastically making the point to those in other threads who said 4GB RAM was enough because any memory paging would occur quickly in SSD. Thus completely ignoring the pitfalls of relying heavily on limited-space, limited-write-cycle-lifespan storage media.

And it's not even "fast" really. Yeah, it's better than paging out to a spinner, but SSD read/writes are still a LOT slower than physical RAM

 

[throAU]

50 GB of swap with those apps running (as per screenshot) = memory leak somewhere.

 

[Brandon263]

You should definitely not be having that many page ins and page outs after restarting your machine. You shouldn't be having any with light to moderate use for several days of uptime, and then only moderate page ins and outs for several more days. You almost certainly have either a runaway application or a fault in the factory installation of OS X (it happens). Perhaps you should try reinstalling OS X, without installing any other software for several hours and see if you get any page outs in activity monitor. If not, install one application at a time, use it for a few hours, and watch activity monitor until you find the culprit. If, on the other hand, you see a lot of paging on a fresh installation of OS X before you even install any applications, then you may have a hardware problem and would benefit from a trip to the apple store.

I'll definitely take it back if the issue continues, but, strangely, I think that it's getting better with use. I last restarted it yesterday and this is what it's showing:

 

[ayres]

watch out, chrome is a leach - I rarely it open for long

I'll definitely take it back if the issue continues, but, strangely, I think that it's getting better with use. I last restarted it yesterday and this is what it's showing:

 

[HiDEF]

I'll definitely take it back if the issue continues, but, strangely, I think that it's getting better with use. I last restarted it yesterday and this is what it's showing:

Have you experienced any slow down's with all those apps open?

 

[Brandon263]

Have you experienced any slow down's with all those apps open?

No, it's actually handling everything quite well. I'm a bit surprised, though, to be fair, I haven't really put it through anything difficult like hard core gaming or complex video editing.

 

[beautifulcoder]

This is odd. You have free memory so why is it swapping at all? Could it be your user profile?

 

[Psychj0e]

No, it's actually handling everything quite well. I'm a bit surprised, though, to be fair, I haven't really put it through anything difficult like hard core gaming or complex video editing.

So you've noticed no slowdowns, but you don't think 4gb of ram is enough?

BTW - if 4gb is not enough, do you really think it's worth spending the extra $$$ so you have 56gb of swap!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[happyhippo1337]

Gosh, had to register cause I could not stand this discussions here anymore.

Sure: 100$ for 4GB of RAM is somehow overpriced, but still a no-brainer. But it's almost 250$ for some folks due to discounts and stuff etc that they don't get with Apple directly.

And: I deliberately tried to mess up my new MBA #13 (4GB) with 17 open Chrome Tabs, 10 Safari Tabs, Youtube HD Video + 1080p MKV 12GB file playing at once while doing light Photoshop stuff and editing a word document. I would have bought 8GB, but this thing was provided by my employer for free, so well, not much to be done about it.

Running in the background:

Wunderlist
Teamspeak
Evernote
LittleSnitch
BTSync
Caffeine
Spotify (actively streaming)
Dropbox
Mac App Store

Problems: freakin' none ! zero ! Fast as hell.

Mavericks will even improve on this situation. So can we please stop calling everyone who doesn't upgrade to 8GB a fool and pretend his system will stop being useable in about two years? That is so not the case -.-

 

[Lucille Carter]

If his computer is new and his dropbox files are syncing it can use some resources. My laptop took over 6 hours to sync all the files.

He/She still has something else wrong.

 

[happyhippo1337]

Dropbox problems have been discussed in several boards, mac / non-mac related. They seem to have some serious **** going wrong at the moment. Seen screenshots of Dropbox using up to 95% of CPU-workload for a few hours.

 

[gnasher729]

I had to restart my new MacBook Air with 4 GB of RAM because there wasn't enough space left as it as using all the available memory for SWAP. It's a bit ridiculous.

I don't know what numbers you were looking at, but your screenshot shows 1.55 GB of unused memory. So what exactly is the problem? Was the problem that you didn't like some numbers that you saw, or did something actually not work?

----------

My question is what is dropbox doing that it is using so much CPU? (According to the images you posted.)

Brand new Mac, and it tries to synchronise lots of stuff? Just guessing. Lots of things are going on on a brand new machine that stop quite soon.

 

[Psychj0e]

Just like the people who say you need loads of ram for gaming... Erm no, most games are written for 32bit systems, so they don't use any more than 3.2gb of ram... Maybe in the future that will change, but then I imagine the Intel 5000 will be your bottleneck by the time your ram means games are unplayable...

 

[tomjleeds]

Weird. Something third-party is definitely doing something wrong.

Perhaps the Dropbox client is stupid as hell and instead of writing files directly to disk loads the whole thing into memory before doing so?

 

[HiDEF]

Gosh, had to register cause I could not stand this discussions here anymore.

Sure: 100$ for 4GB of RAM is somehow overpriced, but still a no-brainer. But it's almost 250$ for some folks due to discounts and stuff etc that they don't get with Apple directly.

And: I deliberately tried to mess up my new MBA #13 (4GB) with 17 open Chrome Tabs, 10 Safari Tabs, Youtube HD Video + 1080p MKV 12GB file playing at once while doing light Photoshop stuff and editing a word document. I would have bought 8GB, but this thing was provided by my employer for free, so well, not much to be done about it.

Running in the background:

Wunderlist
Teamspeak
Evernote
LittleSnitch
BTSync
Caffeine
Spotify (actively streaming)
Dropbox
Mac App Store

Problems: freakin' none ! zero ! Fast as hell.

Mavericks will even improve on this situation. So can we please stop calling everyone who doesn't upgrade to 8GB a fool and pretend his system will stop being useable in about two years? That is so not the case -.-

Welcome to MacRumors!

I'm glad that the 4GB's of RAM is working out for you! And I'm glad you've put it through its paces, running all sorts of task.

I've been back and forth on whether to keep or just return my 13" 4GBs of RAM MBA just because EVERYONE says to go for 8 gigs.

Personally, it's a secondary computer (my mini is my main machine) and everything seems to be fine. I've also have kept an eye on Activity Manager just to see what kind of processes are running and whats eating ram and I can't seem to find a problem with it.

I'm still undecided; I have until Sunday to make a final decision but it looks like I might keep. Unless of course, Retina steals my hearts and I make the switch to rMBP, but seems unlikely.

 

[Intell]

I don't know what numbers you were looking at, but your screenshot shows 1.55 GB of unused memory. So what exactly is the problem? Was the problem that you didn't like some numbers that you saw, or did something actually not work?

His problem is that his swap (memory written to disk) has completely filled his disk. The amount of inactive/free ram is irrelevant as to why his swap has completely filled 50+GB of drive space. Only under extremely rare circumstances would this happen. Something on his machine is leaking memory very quickly.

 

[climater]

How much free disk space is in a new Macbook Air?

Hi,

I plan to purchase a new Macbook Air and would hesitate to pay $200 more to double the SSD from 128GB to 256. I wonder how much free disk space available apart from what OS X has taken in a new machine. I'm a researcher who does quite a bit of data crunching. But I can live with a 1TB USB3.0 portable HDD. Thanks.