Swap space on SnowLeopard

[VS007]

My Laptop runs slow and often spins when I open the browser or other apps sometimes and found the load average to be less than and also about 300MB free memory,till I notice swap as 40MB/256MB on iStat.

Questions:
1. How do I find out what process is causing the swap?
The top does not show swap, and the vm_stat does not show swap either like vmstat does.

2. In the memory what does the wired, Active, Inactive memory mean?The only value that makes sense is Free.

 

[netnothing]

My Laptop runs slow and often spins when I open the browser or other apps sometimes and found the load average to be less than and also about 300MB free memory,till I notice swap as 40MB/256MB on iStat.

Questions:
1. How do I find out what process is causing the swap?
The top does not show swap, and the vm_stat does not show swap either like vmstat does.

2. In the memory what does the wired, Active, Inactive memory mean?The only value that makes sense is Free.

300MB of Free memory is pretty low.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
This will explain the memory values in Activity Monitor.

-Kevin

 

[VS007]

300MB of Free memory is pretty low.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342
This will explain the memory values in Activity Monitor.

-Kevin

Thanks Kevin. That helped!

Is there a way to find out which process is swapping?

 

[VS007]

My MacBook Air all of a sudden felt so sluggish, I was only surfing and no video, and then the top showed a process WebKitPlugin hogging 80% CPU and only 31MB free.

I had seen this WebKitPlugin before also and seen it go up.
So now I have two candidates to look for
1. WebKitPlugin : What process is causing this? How do I get rid of it?
I could find this info: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/784831/
2. Swap : How do I find which process is using most of it or what are the most memory hogging processes?

----
Processes: 59 total, 3 running, 56 sleeping, 283 threads 23:48:55
Load Avg: 1.29, 1.36, 1.15 CPU usage: 40.8% user, 10.93% sys, 48.98% idle
SharedLibs: 7012K resident, 5024K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 45625 total, 863M resident, 13M private, 248M shared.
PhysMem: 288M wired, 1161M active, 566M inactive, 2015M used, 31M free.
VM: 139G vsize, 1041M framework vsize, 326099(0) pageins, 116529(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 1466279/1272M in, 1222211/288M out.
Disks: 492271/5785M read, 853842/14G written.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #POR #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE
5287- WebKitPlugin 79.5 20:40.33 6/1 1 162 752 164M 15M 68M
5415 top 18.7 00:11.69 1/1 0 24 33 1036K 264K 1608K
158- DashboardCli 2.1 54:58.53 5 2 315 244 19M+ 15M- 24M
5405 Terminal 0.7 00:01.57 5 1 116- 114- 3884K- 22M 17M-
3854 Safari 0.4 85:36.75 11 2 473 36331 443M 50M 579M
0- kernel_task 0.4 29:28.31 62/2 0 2 525 10M 0B 73M
60 WindowServer 0.2 64:57.64 5 1 352 1356 11M 31M 47M
26- CoolBookSwit 0.2 04:27.15 1 0 17 25 108K 240K 472K

 

[sammich]

I wouldn't be concerned. Unless your page outs (writes to swap) are more than your page ins (to RAM) by a factor of about 2 then you needn't worry.

Also, you are using a piffling 40MB of swap. My computer (on a very slow drive) always runs on about 2 GB of swap after a days usage but only has a ratio of page in/out of 4:1.

Not sure what WebKitPlugin is. But open Activity Monitor (Apps/Utilities) and find that process. If it's owned by you, you can inspect it by double clicking and see where it's located in open files. WebKitPlugin is a (obviously) a plugin platform, but not sure what it's there if you're not developing. But open up /Library/Safari/Plugins (i think) and the same folder in your home folder and see what's in there.