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Can someone explain this in Activity Monitor?

W

wwwluckyro

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 25, 2007
31
0
Romania
Even after a fresh reboot, I get this huge virtual memory usage in Activity Monitor.

I mean, 41 GB of virtual memory? wtf..

I'm running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.1 on a Intel Mac mini with 1GB RAM.

So yeah, can someone please explain this strange behavior? Can this be something really bad? Any ideas on how to fix?

Thank you :)

Edit: I added the attachment. I don't know why it didn't show up the first time.
 

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That's quirky. I can replicate it on my system too (19 processes, 39.16GB of virtual memory right now). I don't know why it's reporting such a high number if the listed processes don't consume that much virtual memory.
-Chasen
 
I have about 11GB VM and I wondered why it is so high for almost every app?!
 
I've just noticed I'm getting the same issue on my new MacBook. 37GB of Virtual Memory immediately after a restart is bizarre. Any word on this?
 
Still same problem after that long.. I found no solution or explanation for this. The computer doesn't appear slow, it just doesn't feel right. Can anyone explain this? :confused:
 
Been covered a few times.

xUKHCx said:
I'll add my usual response here

13GB VM Tiger - with explanation of VM and its usage

39GB VM Leopard

It is perfectly normal under Leopard to have VM sizes of anywhere between 20-60GB. When i first installed Leopard mine actually went over 100GB.
Click to expand...

At this point in time my VM is 50GB and it is constantly around there whenever I look
 
ok im under the impression that virtual memory is an amount set by a process and that it doesnt particularly use all of that memory allocation. the amount of memory that should be monitored is the real memory. ive been told by other people on this forum (cant remember exact post) to ignore virtual memory usage.

http://guides.macrumors.com/Virtual_memory

the virtual memory size in Leopard is definitely a lot bigger than Tiger but my real memory usage only looks to to be a little more than Tiger.

my virtual memory ATM is 43.72 GB while i have 867 MB or active/wired memory out of 1.5 GB.
 
Thanks, xUKHCx

I think I'm gonna run YASU and probably a defragmentation tool to see if it helps. I know YASU helps .. once it cleared a few gigs :eek: shocking how files are forgotten like that.
 
12gb Vm for me running leopard with 4days UT...

it depends on how much hard drive space you have, i only have around 23gb free.. not sure about the rest of yous
 
wwwluckyro said:
Thanks, xUKHCx

I think I'm gonna run YASU and probably a defragmentation tool to see if it helps. I know YASU helps .. once it cleared a few gigs :eek: shocking how files are forgotten like that.
Click to expand...

There's nothing to "help". There's nothing wrong with your applications using virtual memory.
 
Relax, guys! I have 41 GBs of VM now and only 1.3 GB free on my HD (1 GB RAM) on my MacBook and its working perfectly fine :p
 
Okay to clear a few things up.

Virtual memory is the theoretical maximum amount of memory that each application could use if it needed it. It does not mean that the application is actually using that much. It is just the application has told the OS that it may need that amount and that the OS should be prepared to allocate some or all of it if the application needs it in the future.

Virtual memory does not tell you anything about the amount of RAM or HDD space that is being used on your computer and should basically be ignored. The important value is real memory usage.
 
Okay, so it's a bug in Activity Monitor. Add another column (any one will do) and the Virtual Memory goes back to being a more realistic figure (for me at least).
 
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