MBP too many Page Ins / Page Outs

[moez]

Hey guys

I have a MacbookPro 3,1 (C2D 2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm HDD).

I had upgraded the RAM to OWC.

I am getting way too many Page Ins and Page Outs as can be seen from the screen shot. Any idea why this may be so? Is this a faulty RAM or some other issue.

Thanks for your help.

 

[GGJstudios]

I am getting way too many Page Ins and Page Outs as can be seen from the screen shot. Any idea why this may be so? Is this a faulty RAM or some other issue.

Page ins are not an issue. It's page outs and swap used that indicate if you're maxing out your RAM. Check Activity Monitor's System Memory tab to see your page outs and swap used.

 

[moez]

Page ins are not an issue. It's page outs and swap used that indicate if you're maxing out your RAM. Check Activity Monitor's System Memory tab to see your page outs and swap used.

I have also uploaded the activity monitor tab.

I had read that Page Outs are not a reason to worry is less than Page Ins but the issue is I have problems watching 720p videos and YouTube clips also hang up so I thought it could be a RAM issue.

 

[GGJstudios]

I had read that Page Outs are not a reason to worry is less than Page Ins

It's the opposite. Page ins are required when you launch apps, open documents, etc., so you will always have page ins. Page outs occur when you don't have enough RAM to accommodate all the memory requirements, so you have to swap pages to make room for more page ins.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[rikscha]

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It's the other way around. You should worry about your page outs and swaps. Your ram should be ok. Are you using safari a lot? I realised in the past few weeks how bad safari actually is in terms of ram usage. Shifting to chrome 10 solved my page out problems. Also how often do you restart your mac? In my experience it's better to restart mac os more often. I wouldn't recommend using it for more than 3 days without a reboot. With leopard I could easily have it on for a week and more. I'm using a high spec i7 2010 MacBook pro

 

[GGJstudios]

Also how often do you restart your mac? In my experience it's better to restart mac os more often. I wouldn't recommend using it for more than 3 days without a reboot. With leopard I could easily have it on for a week and more. I'm using a high spec i7 2010 MacBook pro

Restarting isn't required. Many in this forum run weeks or months at a time without restarting. This isn't Windows, after all.

 

[rikscha]

Wirelessly posted (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/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

Also how often do you restart your mac? In my experience it's better to restart mac os more often. I wouldn't recommend using it for more than 3 days without a reboot. With leopard I could easily have it on for a week and more. I'm using a high spec i7 2010 MacBook pro

Restarting isn't required. Many in this forum run weeks or months at a time without restarting. This isn't Windows, after all.

Blabla mac os is the greatest and restarting is a windows thing.... This is complete rubbish. Mac os ram usage isn't as sophisticated as many people want to make you believe. I'm speaking about my own experience and yes, mac os does run faster after a reboot.. Fact.

 

[GGJstudios]

Blabla mac os is the greatest and restarting is a windows thing.... This is complete rubbish. Mac os ram usage isn't as sophisticated as many people want to make you believe. I'm speaking about my own experience and yes, mac os does run faster after a reboot.. Fact.

Rather than personal anecdotes, do you have any factual evidence to support your claim? It's not a "Mac is the greatest" issue. It's the fact that restarting isn't required to free up RAM or anything else to improve performance on Mac OS X.

 

[Hansr]

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Blabla mac os is the greatest and restarting is a windows thing.... This is complete rubbish. Mac os ram usage isn't as sophisticated as many people want to make you believe. I'm speaking about my own experience and yes, mac os does run faster after a reboot.. Fact.

It depends on what you are running, if you are not getting a lot of page outs it doesn't matter at all. I've had machines running for >1YR where restarting after that time didn't make any difference.

 

[rikscha]

Rather than personal anecdotes, do you have any factual evidence to support your claim? It's not a "Mac is the greatest" issue. It's the fact that restarting isn't required to free up RAM or anything else to improve performance on Mac OS X.

Why do I need to prove my claim? I'm telling you about my experiences I had with my Macs. By asking me to prove it you are indeed making this a "Mac is the greatest issue". You do not seem to believe me and cannot accept my opinion. I'm not making this up, why should I? I just experienced that especially with using safari over couple of days having several tabs opened (with several I mean 5-7). Over time, Safari will absorbe more and more ram. Thats why I suggested shifting to Chrome for example. I believe that Mac OS is not properly working with the inactive ram, the system will not always use inactive ram when running low of ram. As a prove I see my friends macbook pro '09 with 2gig of ram. She used to multitask a lot with her macbook with leopard and had terrible 6 months after moving to snow leopard. Using itunes, safari and spotify at the same time resulted in many beachballs after using these apps for 3 days and more. The people in the Apple store couldnt help her. They just swapped her hard drive. They also said that it couldnt be the ram because for the kind of things she is doing with her macbook 2gb of ram would be enough. I upgraded her to 4gigs and installed chrome and viola, no more beachballs. I would say it is a problem of Safari and the way how the system uses the ram.

@hansr, yes I agree it depends on what you are using, but I see Safari to be a very basic app.

 

[Hansr]

@hansr, yes I agree it depends on what you are using, but I see Safari to be a very basic app.

Unfortunately with growing internet technologies Safari and Firefox have become gargantuan beasts that feed off RAM especially when you bring in a lot of client side stuff such as plugins for video and additional content. Limiting Flash with things like ClickToFlash is a first step measure and pretty much a necessity to use a browser efficiently now a days in terms of RAM consumption. Chrome has a better architecture but Safari behaves considerably better with the ClickToFlash and Adblock extensions.

But I agree with you that for anyone doing any considerable multi tasking, 2GB is an outdated level of "sufficient RAM" for OSX. It's more of a light browsing and e-mail level with modern versions of OSX.

 

[rikscha]

Unfortunately with growing internet technologies Safari and Firefox have become gargantuan beasts that feed off RAM especially when you bring in a lot of client side stuff such as plugins for video and additional content. Limiting Flash with things like ClickToFlash is a first step measure and pretty much a necessity to use a browser efficiently now a days in terms of RAM consumption. Chrome has a better architecture but Safari behaves considerably better with the ClickToFlash and Adblock extensions.

But I agree with you that for anyone doing any considerable multi tasking, 2GB is an outdated level of "sufficient RAM" for OSX. It's more of a light browsing and e-mail level with modern versions of OSX.

I cant really accept that as a general solution. I think that your browser should just work without any kind of tweaking. By the way, she wasn't using any extensions with her browser, though a lot of flash. I think that 2GB of ram should be enough for more than just light level work. I dont consider itunes, safari and spotify anything else to be than light. These are some of the reasons why I believe that the way how ram is used under Mac OS isnt as perfect as many claim it is. It was quite frustrating for her to see that not even after 2 years she needed to do an upgrade to her macbook.

edit: I just realised that I might sound a bit harsh in my comments, this was not my intention.

 

[Hansr]

I cant really accept that as a general solution. I think that your browser should just work without any kind of tweaking. By the way, she wasn't using any extensions with her browser, though a lot of flash.

That's why Apple no longer ships Flash with their machines. Adding it kills any browsers performance memory wise. Chrome under Windows most likely handles it best but it's still lackluster.

I think that 2GB of ram should be enough for more than just light level work.

If you want a monster like Flash to run loose then that is no longer an option. I've seen Safari alone taking up 1.5GB after a week of use with Flash on. With ClickToFlash the same period was <400MB.

These are some of the reasons why I believe that the way how ram is used under Mac OS isnt as perfect as many claim it is.

It's by no means perfect but what it is, is much better than Windows' memory management even when compared to W7 which is light years ahead of older versions. Also .NET gc keeps getting better and better but OSX framework gc is pretty young so if a lot of developers start using it instead of explicit memory management it may cause a lesser divide for general users in the near future.

 

[rikscha]

That's why Apple no longer ships Flash with their machines. Adding it kills any browsers performance memory wise. Chrome under Windows most likely handles it best but it's still lackluster.



If you want a monster like Flash to run loose then that is no longer an option. I've seen Safari alone taking up 1.5GB after a week of use with Flash on. With ClickToFlash the same period was <400MB.



It's by no means perfect but what it is, is much better than Windows' memory management even when compared to W7 which is light years ahead of older versions. Also .NET gc keeps getting better and better but OSX framework gc is pretty young so if a lot of developers start using it instead of explicit memory management it may cause a lesser divide for general users in the near future.

It is not only flash which causes the problem, Chrome does work much better on my system than Safari, even using heavily Flash. I mainly use flash players to watch videos. I'm not really browsing flash websites so using clicktoflash wouldnt really help. But again, I agree that Flash is probably causing most of the problems people are experiencing. I am not using Windows and to know that Ram usage is more efficient under Mac OS than in Windows doesnt really improve my situation Thats the funny thing here in the forum. Many people are not happy with something on their mac but are very positive about it because the situation under Windows might be even worse. Speaking generally, not meaning you explicitly. But it's true, you cant use your windows machine several days without restarting it.