Not enough memory?

[danadice]

My mac has been a fine performer until I started running out of space on my hard drive.

I have a 15" macbook pro, with the latest Lion updates. HD is 200 GB, 4GB RAM.

I took time recently to move all large, non-daily files to my external HD (which I leave at home). Most of those were movies that I had made for work.

I use MS Word for Mac to make a newsletter for work. This has been working fine; however, today I'm getting boxes saying that Word doesn't have enough memory.

Is the fact that I have 89GB left on my HD making this a problem? I figure I've got 4GB of RAM and I'm only using Word (not a ton of other apps at the same time). I don't understand what could be the problem.

Please help!

 

[S.B.G]

My mac has been a fine performer until I started running out of space on my hard drive.

I have a 15" macbook pro, with the latest Lion updates. HD is 200 GB, 4GB RAM.

I took time recently to move all large, non-daily files to my external HD (which I leave at home). Most of those were movies that I had made for work.

I use MS Word for Mac to make a newsletter for work. This has been working fine; however, today I'm getting boxes saying that Word doesn't have enough memory.

Is the fact that I have 89GB left on my HD making this a problem? I figure I've got 4GB of RAM and I'm only using Word (not a ton of other apps at the same time). I don't understand what could be the problem.

Please help!

Open Activity Monitor and go to the System memory tab and post a screen shot of it. Let's see what your Page outs look like.

Chances are you are very low on RAM and the computer is forced to use the HDD for virtual memory, thus slowing everything down and causing Word to error out.

 

[danadice]

Re:

This is what I've got.

 

[GGJstudios]

This is what I've got.

Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[danadice]

So, basically I should be restarting my system more than I do.

I'll restart and do another screen shot.

 

[danadice]

This looks much better. How often should I be restarting my machine? I suppose I just get lazy and close the top.

 

[danadice]

Also what do "page ins and outs" mean?

 

[GGJstudios]

Also what do "page ins and outs" mean?

Read the link I posted. And you don't need to regularly restart your Mac. Many run for months without restarting. I only recommended it so you could accurately track your page outs.

 

[danadice]

Read the link I posted. And you don't need to regularly restart your Mac. Many run for months without restarting. I only recommended it so you could accurately track your page outs.

Thanks for posting the article. Does my lack of hard drive space affect my memory?

 

[GGJstudios]

Thanks for posting the article. Does my lack of hard drive space affect my memory?

No, your RAM (memory) isn't affected by hard drive space. However, the reverse is true. If you're maxing out your RAM and paging, that requires writing RAM contents to your hard drive. If you have little or no hard drive space available, it impedes the paging process. You should try to keep around 10% or more of your hard drive space free.