page outs and ins will happen regardless - as OSX moves some pages into there after certain amounts of inactivity. no matter what.
i know all about page outs, ins, swaps and VM in general. i have looked into the processes in a fair bit of depth, certainly miles more then what that article is that spinnerlys linked to thats for sure.
im not arguing that they dont slow the computer down, of course they do - but having 800MB of swap is not as bad as you make it out to be!
back on topic, i dont think its a RAM issue.
No, pages out do NOT happen regardless. Page outs happen when the OS becomes memory constrained, and a few special cases.
This is from the Apple Support page:
Tip: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs.
Page out are bad, always bad. The only thing to discuss is exactly how bad.
Also, for those that don't understand this I'd like to explain why paging is bad.
When an OS (Mac OS, Windows, Unix, etc) runs out of memory it writes a block (or page) of memory to disk. This is called paging. The process of moving the read/write head on your drive and then writing the used but inactive memory out. Sooner or later, the OS has to go and read that memory back in. This process can repeat itself many times per second. Needless to say, disk access times are many orders of magnitude slower than memory access times. And oh, by the way, if you were performing any sort of disk IO, you will now also have disk contention with the paging process. This is all extremely bad. This is why no OS EVER pages unless it absolutely has to. This is also why paging kills system performance more than anything else. Paging idles you CPU greatly and introduces IO performance penalties.
The only 3 option in order of best to worst are:
1) Get more memory. This is usually the best option.
2) Free up existing memory. The assumption though is that you would have if you could have.
3) Get a faster drive to increase paging performance or place your swap on a different drive to reduce drive contention. This is old school but Unix admins used to to this all the time in the 90... It help but still sucked.
If I got something wrong, please let me know. This is really a simple problem though.
? thats not correct at all. when using VMs that DEMAND 2GB dedicated memory (in this instance) you are GOING to have page outs from other programs and you are going to have swap memory increasing as a result of that. page outs are not a bad thing - they are actually a good thing, would you rather the VM memory being chucked into VM (virtual memory) directly?
