Do I need more Memory

[Lloyd Christmas]

My MBP has been on for 5 days and 15 hours. Im somewhat new to macs and was wondering if someone could explain to me what page in and page out means. istat says that i have 610,716 page ins and 717,153 page outs. what does that mean. Would this have something to do with my mbp beachballing constantly. I did a clean install after using time machine to back my stuff up but it keeps happening. Thanks Lloyd

 

[r.j.s]

How much memory do you have?

With that many page swaps, you definitely need more RAM.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

How much memory do you have?

With that many page swaps, you definitely need more RAM.

I only have 2 gigs.

 

[r.j.s]

I only have 2 gigs.

What are you using it for?

EDIT: Here's my info, with an uptime of more than 9 days.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

What are you using it for?

EDIT: Here's my info, with an uptime of more than 9 days.

im not using it for anything special. mostly listening to music and watching movies on it. Just basic computer stuff that is not taxing on the machine. sounding like i need to invest in some memory from crucial. could something else be wrong with my machine? Lloyd

 

[RDM3]

RAM is so cheap there is no reason not to max it out.

 

[reallynotnick]

Are those numbers from activity monitor? Usually that gives it in MB or god forbid GB.
Basically my pages out stay under about 10MB because I never max out my RAM, which I have 4GB of. If you are having 100s of MBs+ of pages out you will definitely want to look into at least upgrading to 4GB, it's dirt cheap.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

Are those numbers from activity monitor? Usually that gives it in MB or god forbid GB.
Basically my pages out stay under about 10MB because I never max out my RAM, which I have 4GB of. If you are having 100s of MBs+ of pages out you will definitely want to look into at least upgrading to 4GB, it's dirt cheap.

i got my page in/outs from istat. what would cause my memory from being maxed out. i think i dont tax my machine very hard. Lloyd

 

[Azathoth]

My MBP has been on for 5 days and 15 hours. Im somewhat new to macs and was wondering if someone could explain to me what page in and page out means. istat says that i have 610,716 page ins and 717,153 page outs. what does that mean. Would this have something to do with my mbp beachballing constantly. I did a clean install after using time machine to back my stuff up but it keeps happening. Thanks Lloyd

Without knowing anything about Macs, I really wouldn't worry about any of the paging stats. A 2gig machine should be able to run music and movies no problem, unless something is configured wrong.

Im using a 1.66GHz, 2.5GB windows 7 machine with music, firefox (20tabs), Openoffice and a Linux virtual machine (768MB ) running without problems, so your machine should definately cope without any more memory...

 

[Cave Man]

Which MBP do you have?

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

Which MBP do you have?

i have the 15 inch mbp 2.4. i got in at the end of february 09. would the high number of page outs have anything to do with it beach balling all the time when using it esp in safari.


Azathoth- what should i look at to see if my machine is configured wrong. i spent some major coin on it and would like to fix or improve how it runs. Thanks Lloyd

 

[r.j.s]

i have the 15 inch mbp 2.4. i got in at the end of february 09. would the high number of page outs have anything to do with it beach balling all the time when using it esp in safari.

Yes. Every time it has to page out, it must spin up the hard drive and write that page to the disk. There is something wrong, you shouldn't have that many page outs with 2GB of RAM unless you were working with some really RAM intensive stuff.

Are you on the latest version of Safari? A memory leak in Safari could cause that many page outs with nothing else being wrong.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

Yes. Every time it has to page out, it must spin up the hard drive and write that page to the disk. There is something wrong, you shouldn't have that many page outs with 2GB of RAM unless you were working with some really RAM intensive stuff.

Are you on the latest version of Safari? A memory leak in Safari could cause that many page outs with nothing else being wrong.

alright i got ya on the disk spinning up all the time but i dont use ram intensive programs. i did a clean install recently and it never fixed the problem. ill try another one this weekend when i go home and ill see if that changes anything. i checked safari and im using 4.0.3. i wish i knew what was wrong with this thing. starting to piss me off. thanks Lloyd

 

[r.j.s]

Then maybe one of the RAM sticks is bad, but it still reports 2GB.

This could cause it as well.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

Then maybe one of the RAM sticks is bad, but it still reports 2GB.

This could cause it as well.

really. how would i be able to check that. when i look at about this mac, it shows that i have two gb. wondering if i should bring it in to the apple store and let them take a look at it. just by chance, would having your harddrive somewhat full of stuff. i have about 68 gb of empty space on a 250 gb harddrive. should i move some stuff to an external or does that have anything to do with page outs thanks Lloyd

 

[r.j.s]

That's enough free space - that's not the problem.

I'd say take it in, there is no reason it should be beachballing just browsing the web and watching movies.

 

[Lloyd Christmas]

That's enough free space - that's not the problem.

I'd say take it in, there is no reason it should be beachballing just browsing the web and watching movies.

alright, i guess ill make an appointment to bring it in to the apple store over the weekend. thanks for the help really appreciate it. Lloyd

 

[pwatson80]

Hold D down at start up with your OSX disc in the drive to load the hardware diagnostics.

Check you memory there.

Crucial sell 4GB at around £60, OWC are similar pricing. Get it max'd, if your current memory is faulty then you'll fix it by replacing it. If not you can still get your machine looked at by apple.