High VM Size, Page Ins, Page Outs.. need more ram?

[brouhaha]

Comp has been running REALLY sluggish lately, hard time running safari with a few tabs open, fan runs at max speed 24/7 and everything takes a long time to load.

Took it to genius bar, they checked some hardware, and recommended I basically format and start over.. I don't want to do that

I have a macbook pro, 2 gig of ram..

noticed that the vm size is like 130 gig, page in - 300mb, page out - 1.6mb

I typically don't run anything but safari/firefox, adium, itunes, movie players etc. I've been told that, those programs don't require that much ram, but do i need to upgrade to 3 or 4 gigs?

Thanks

 

[Hellhammer]

2GB is enough for those tasks. I would do a reinstall of OS X, that rules out all software issues

 

[oregon2]

1.6MB of of page out is nothing...

 

[brouhaha]

I really don't want to reinstall OS though, I don't even know if I have the upgrade discs anymore either. may have lost them moving

 

[broken-chaos]

The high amount of VM is normal. VM is only very loosely related to physical amounts of RAM. For instance, my VM is sitting at over 115GiB with just Safari and Mail running.

That low an amount of page ins and page outs is nothing to worry about, either.

If your fans are running at max speed, then it sounds like the processor is running hot all the time. Check the Activity monitor for any processes that are constantly using high amounts of CPU power, not memory.

 

[brouhaha]

The high amount of VM is normal. VM is only very loosely related to physical amounts of RAM. For instance, my VM is sitting at over 115GiB with just Safari and Mail running.

That low an amount of page ins and page outs is nothing to worry about, either.

If your fans are running at max speed, then it sounds like the processor is running hot all the time. Check the Activity monitor for any processes that are constantly using high amounts of CPU power, not memory.

hmm thanks. i know safari/firefox uses a lot of cpu power, but sometimes when i just have adium or mail running, my comp will be very slow/sluggish with fans on full power. only way to figure out whats wrong is to reinstall OS?

 

[sammich]

Open up Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities). Set the drop down menu to 'All Processes', then sort the table by '% CPU' Usage. If the fans are running then chances are something is using a lot of CPU. Post a screenshot or list the culprits.

If there is something else happening, have a peek at the 'Disk Activity' at the bottom, and see if anything is using the hard drive.