Check this out! 41 GIG swap!

[flowfree]

HELP!

Okay, first, I have a very solid background in computing, and I've been somewhat of a hacker using windows systems since I was twelve. I can do just about anything on my XP system, but the Mac world is pretty new to me. My other half uses the MacBook Pro we have much more often than I do, mainly for Lightroom, Firefox, and Photoshop, and on that I can guarantee it performs much better. I still need Windows for games though. Anyway, it's been slowing down recently. At first, we thought it was overheating (he likes to leave it on for days at a time, just sleeping, a crime, I know) so he shut it off for a full day. Still slower. So I went into activity monitor, and looked at the mem usage. Now, I've seen some crazy things. I had a game in 2000 that would use a quarter of a gig of ram, and another half of virtual, but this? THIS IS INSANITY!

-http://www.imagebanana.com/view/1ok2piob/Picture3.png

The virtual mem usage for firefox is expected (He HOARDS tabs) but everything else is downright retarded.

Anyway, my question is: why is this happening, it's never before, and how can I fix it?

 

[AlphaDogg]

You think that's bad? Look at mine:

I don't even know what I do that is so memory intensive... Well, I ordered 8GB RAM, so that should help...

 

[imaginex20]

I don't think you guys are reading the activity monitor correctly. If you were indeed low on memory and if virtual memory was being used you would see a large number of page outs ratio compared to page ins.

Looking at your guy's memory usage, more memory wouldn't really help but wouldn't hurt either.

 

[kutsushita]

yeah im @187gb

now you made my ocd kick in
*starts googling how to read the stupid activity monitor)

 

[Pentad]

I upgraded to 8 Gig a long time ago and I hope the new MBPs will allow 16 Gig. I usually have two or three VMs, PS, Word, Safari, FireFox, Eclipse, Excel, Thunderbird and VLC running at the same time. I love Spaces as it allows me to jump back and forth.

However, this is a 'snapshot' of a light work session for me...I'm not bragging or anything, I just have a lot of work to do.

 

[kutsushita]

I upgraded to 8 Gig a long time ago and I hope the new MBPs will allow 16 Gig. I usually have two or three VMs, PS, Word, Safari, FireFox, Eclipse, Excel, Thunderbird and VLC running at the same time. I love Spaces as it allows me to jump back and forth.

However, this is a 'snapshot' of a light work session for me...I'm not bragging or anything, I just have a lot of work to do.

nice peace sign in your snapshot LOL

 

[flowfree]

So what you're saying is that the virtual memory column in the list doesn't list memory thats actually being used?

Weird. I'm soooooo not used to using a mac.

 

[Phil A.]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F5153d Safari/6533.18.5)

Virtual memory on the mac is not the same as virtual memory on a PC: what you think of as virtual memory (I.e. Memory swapped out to disk) is shown as a total under swap used in activity monitor.
If you want to understand how OS X manages memory, take a look at this developer document from Apple.

 

[NickZac]

OP, your memory looks really good actually...50% of it is free which is pretty good. Even though 2GB is less than the current standard of 4GB, if that is as much RAM as you use, the issue is probably not RAM related. When the green disappears and the 'Page Outs' start going up, then you need to upgrade.

I upgraded to 8 Gig a long time ago and I hope the new MBPs will allow 16 Gig. I usually have two or three VMs, PS, Word, Safari, FireFox, Eclipse, Excel, Thunderbird and VLC running at the same time. I love Spaces as it allows me to jump back and forth.

However, this is a 'snapshot' of a light work session for me...I'm not bragging or anything, I just have a lot of work to do.

OMG I have never seen a shot like that on a MBP with 8GB RAM...that is INSANE!

 

[Pentad]

OMG I have never seen a shot like that on a MBP with 8GB RAM...that is INSANE!

Yeah, I know...

I really enjoy my MBP and I'm sadden to see Apple push the MBP line from a more professional type system to a consumer only system. I understand that they have found gold in being the best consumer company so it only makes sense to gravitate to such a market.

There really was a time when the Powerbooks and the MBP line considered to be expensive but respected as a high-end professional machine.

Speaking of memory and VMs, I have a colleague who has an HP Elitebook (the 840w line) and they are at 16 gig of memory which helps a lot. They do lots of PS work on huge TIFF images (each image is two to three gig) so you can see how you start layering those and memory is eaten quite quickly.


Cheers!
-P

 

[Pentad]

Hey NickZak, have I mentioned how cool I think your computer is? Man that rocks! Yet, I can't see to find it at my local Best Buy....

 

[nateo200]

Wow this thread totally confused me on how Mac's use ram....Can anyone tell me if my usage is "good" 1.1 -/+ free sounds like not much given I'm not doing anything insane...

 

[NickZac]

I really enjoy my MBP and I'm sadden to see Apple push the MBP line from a more professional type system to a consumer only system. I understand that they have found gold in being the best consumer company so it only makes sense to gravitate to such a market.

There really was a time when the Powerbooks and the MBP line considered to be expensive but respected as a high-end professional machine.

I am sorry to say it as well but it has taken a more similar design to PCs...this time a decade ago, the Apple laptops were literally light years ahead of PCs, which they aren't now. That doesn't mean they aren't better, but the gap of better has decreased. Furthermore, they always seemed to have lines/trims that would have capability that defied all logic and a price tag to reflect it and historically, these systems have sold steadily to users like yourself who need mobility and as much capability as technology allows. I imagine you would greatly benefit from using SATA3, the coming DDR4, and 16-32GB RAM range.

Hey NickZak, have I mentioned how cool I think your computer is? Man that rocks! Yet, I can't see to find it at my local Best Buy....

Like my whip, it's custom yo, it's custom.

Wow this thread totally confused me on how Mac's use ram....Can anyone tell me if my usage is "good" 1.1 -/+ free sounds like not much given I'm not doing anything insane...

You look good RAM wise as you have sufficient free RAM and minimal Page Outs...you may want to go to 8GB if you have the money and want it, but you probably will not see much of a performance difference unless you are rockin' more processes at once.

 

[nateo200]

You look good RAM wise as you have sufficient free RAM and minimal Page Outs...you may want to go to 8GB if you have the money and want it, but you probably will not see much of a performance difference unless you are rockin' more processes at once.

I just discovered spaces on my MBP so I might be bumping up to 8GB soon haha. I was thinking SSD would be next but itll be a while before they go down in price.

 

[wordoflife]

You think that's bad? Look at mine:

snip

I don't even know what I do that is so memory intensive... Well, I ordered 8GB RAM, so that should help...

Same here.

What the heck, 85GB page ins?

 

[dusk007]

Same here.

What the heck, 85GB page ins?

A page in occurs everytime some data is transfered into active memory (or wired). That means if your system runs veerrryyy long without a restart and you close and open apps this number will never stop growing.

Wow this thread totally confused me on how Mac's use ram....Can anyone tell me if my usage is "good" 1.1 -/+ free sounds like not much given I'm not doing anything insane...

You use 50% of your RAM and almost NIL page outs. You would probably do fine with 2 gigs.
All that you need to understand. Active + wired is RAM is "in use".
Free and inactive is basically free aka "not in use". Inactive is just cached. It is not deleted since it is possible you open the app again. Like you close iTunes the RAM goes into inactive. That is why an app opens faster the second time but with an SSD it makes little difference.

Since free and used is only a snapshot of current use the page out/page in ratio shows you if you use swap a lot and might need more RAM. I wouldn't worry about this ratio before it goes above 10%. Before 4 gigs was standard 20% was still not that horrible. Anyway 0.1% is absolutely no reason to recommend 8gigs at all. I am not sure what NickZac is smoking.