Beachball, ram and page-outs...

[spl456]

Hi all,
Just a quick question.
Purchased a early 2011 13" MBP i5. Upped to 8gb RAM.

I still get a fair amount of beach-balls, like today.

Apps open (*-being actively used);
Finder
Outlook*
Safari*
Chrome
Firefox Aurora
Excel
Word
Little Snapper
Preview
NZB Vortex* - uncompressing NZB file, 7gb.

I had a look in activity monitor because l was getting a few beach balls to see if l was getting any page outs so far 17.4mb and counting (18.2+)....



Is this normal?

 

[GGJstudios]

Hi all,
Just a quick question.
Purchased a early 2011 13" MBP i5. Upped to 8gb RAM.

I still get a fair amount of beach-balls, like today.

Apps open (*-being actively used);
Finder
Outlook*
Safari*
Chrome
Firefox Aurora
Excel
Word
Little Snapper
Preview
NZB Vortex* - uncompressing NZB file, 7gb.

I had a look in activity monitor because l was getting a few beach balls to see if l was getting any page outs so far 17.4mb and counting (18.2+)....

[url=http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/28/activitymonitor.png]Image[/URL]

Is this normal?

MS Office apps are notorious RAM hogs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Also, Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.

 

[spl456]

Thanks for the swift reply.
l'll keep an eye on it.