So how many page outs is bad, or how do you gauge what is high?
Well, a few things to note with what you posted...
You've paged out (read "memory" from disk) more than you've paged in. This indicates that your system isn't just writing memory to disk because it's low, but it's reading that paged memory more than once because there's not enough memory to actually keep it loaded in memory.
You're actively paging in (writing memory to disk), it wasn't just done in the past and now it's sitting on disk, the OS is actively trying to free up memory by paging what it can to disk.
You've paged in AND out more than the total amount of memory your system has. That is bad. Quite bad.
You're using nearly as much swap as you have physical memory.
To answer your question about how many pageouts are bad or how to gauge, the lower the number of pageouts the better. My cMBP has been up for 3 days and has paged in 5GB but has paged out nothing and that is healthy. Paging out here and there is fine because there may come a point where you need to access data that was paged in, but you don't want to be actively paging in and out.
You have 4GB memory, you've paged in/out 6GB, and you're using nearly 4GB of swap.
Ok, so what's the difference between pageouts and swap?
Essentially, it's the difference between writing application and cache memory to disk (page in) and taking an entire IDLE process and its memory and writing it to disk (swap in). Your OS has basically determined that your application usage adds up to nearly double your memory (real memory + swap) and that active processes need to have their memory paged in to and out from disk (pageins, pageouts).
You haven't said what model Mac you have so it's hard to give a recommendation on what to upgrade to, however based on your memory usage I would recommend 16GB but even 8GB would be better than what you have now.
I recommend 16GB, if possible, in order to keep as much loaded into memory as possible without going to disk. I'm simply looking at real + pageouts + swap = 14GB. Since you want to keep pageouts to a minimum, you're still looking at 10.6GB total memory (real + pageouts), so 12GB (8GB+4GB DIMMs) would also work for you, again if your hardware supports it, and you may still end up with idle processes being swapped out. I've disabled my swap file.
Another thing to look at is your app usage. I don't know your level of experience/knowledge with OS X, though you do say that you're new to Apple, but some people don't realize that clicking the "X" on an app's window does not exit the app, it simply closes the window. The app will still be running. To actually quit the app you need to either press command-Q or click the app title in the menu bar and select "Quit..." If you're not doing this then every app you run remains running and eventually you end up with tons of apps using up memory and you don't realize it because they don't actually have a window open.
Now, I'm not saying this is happening to you, you could very well be running memory-intensive apps and 4GB simply isn't near enough but it would be useful to both us as well as yourself to understand your usage habits; What apps are you running and are you indeed quitting the apps or are you simply closing their windows so that they continue to run and use memory?
