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More Memory? Yes! - Maybe...

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DougJrS

macrumors regular
Original poster
I have a dual 1.8 G5 with 1 G of ram (512 each processor). I was thinking that iMovie and iDVD would go faster if I added another 1G (2G total 1G per processor). BUT - while in iMovie and iDVD I took a lok at the system monitor and I see
Wired: 124.79
Active 431.59
Inactive: 455.17
Used: 1,011.62

Free: 12.67
VM size 6.26 GB
Page ins/outs 73666/6309

Can someone explain what the Wired, active and inactive mean? I think that I get Active, but is Inactive free or.... and I have no clue about Wired.

Is the free an indication of the amount of RAM free (if yes then what is Inactive) or is the amount of VM free?

Will adding RAM make DVD encoding faster? If I watch in Activity Monitor the CPU is not maxed, so I am guessing that I don't have the RAM to drive the processors at full speed.

Thanks,
Doug
 
Cool, I was about to post a thread about this exact topic. 😎

It looks like you have a lot of Page-outs? Which is a good indicator that you would benefit from some more memory... my Powerbook was getting around 3000 Page-outs with 1GB, so I'd be curious to know if that was a lot or not...
 
dferrara said:
my Powerbook was getting around 3000 Page-outs with 1GB, so I'd be curious to know if that was a lot or not...
Click to expand...

It says that my powerbook has 13,000 page outs! Is that bad? I already have 1 gig of RAM, I don't think I need more.
 
killuminati said:
It says that my powerbook has 13,000 page outs! Is that bad? I already have 1 gig of RAM, I don't think I need more.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing you had your Powerbook on for a really long time? After all, they will just add up... I think... 🙂

I got 3000 in a pretty short amount of time, say < 2 hours.
 
Where can I see my page outs?

If page outs = writes out then I have 45244 right now 😕
 
Oh never mind that. I have just found page ins/outs:
right now 23510/0

Thats when I turened on my eMac and surfed web for about 1 hour
 
How to determine how much mor ememory will help you...

Look in /var/vm if you have more than a couple of swapfile's then you may need more memory. Note these files are maintained by the system and should not be touched.

Note about gow much space the combin3ed swpafiles take up and then reboot the system and check again after afew days of normal activity. If it's about the same then you know you need to add memory.

Having pageouts is not really inidicative by itself of needing more memory. it depends on how much pagin out the system is doing on a regular basis.

Also some programs keep scrtach files instead of using more memory - Photoshop is one of those. So with some programs you may not know how much more memory will actually help you.
 
That's Nothin...

Only been on for about a day w/o restart, and I'm approaching 300,000 pageins. What they are:

Pagein: A page, or window, or whatever... a bit of something that started in the RAM, which was transfered onto the Hard drive, to mak room in the speedier RAM for more active RAM users.

Pageout: When the user wants a pagein'd item, and the HDD has to spit it out and transfer it back into RAM

BTW, I'm @ around 200K pageouts rite now. I have a Rev A PB 12" with maxed ram (640). I almost always have a sliver free, but it's normally a very small percentage. About 10% rite now. I guess I define a demanding user on old hardware, eh? The Scratch disk point is important. Major memory hogs will not always affect the memory or pageins/outs. A way to cut dependence on scratch disks is eliminate things like extensive undo histories, etc.
 
Remember that page ins and outs are over time, so 1000 page outs over an hour isn't great, but over a day is pretty good. For instance I have 552k page outs over 22 days, which is pretty good for me (since I usually run a lot of memory intensive applications). Of course I have also maxed out my machine with memory (3GB) so at this point I can't really do much about my paging situation.
 
when i open my iphoto, my whole computer forze. and my page out was up to 2900 or something and i literlly cant do anything for a good 10-15 second.. andthen it eventually come back to 0
so does that mean 512MB is no good?!
 
ibilly said:
Pagein: A page, or window, or whatever... a bit of something that started in the RAM, which was transfered onto the Hard drive, to mak room in the speedier RAM for more active RAM users.

Pageout: When the user wants a pagein'd item, and the HDD has to spit it out and transfer it back into RAM
Click to expand...

You have it backwards.
 
Pageouts/ins are when an application demands more RAM. If there is none available, the CPU will send a few "pages" of data in the RAM onto the HD to free up space for the app/process that is demanding it (with various levels of priority - i.e. the app you have just opened that need RAM will be near-top priority). When you then switch back to another app (that lets say has had data it previously had and needed in the ram) the CPU will "pagein" the data back to the RAM, after sending pageouts for the other processes.
It's tit-for-tat on a huge numbers scale basically.

Now, if you have LOTS of RAM, this process gets done a lot less, because there is enough RAM to go round happily, but if you get a lot then it means the RAM and HD are swapping data a lot, because there isn't enough space in the RAM to service all the processes needs.

A large dump/pagein/out is experienced on the user end with beach-balling and frenzied HD activity as your system tried to get the data needed in the RAM from the HD, in order for the app to work properly.
🙂
 
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