page file and RAM

[exe163]

I have a 15" 10' MBP with 4GBs of ram. I notice the page file builds up very quickly due to my heavy usage of firefox. It stutters my computer when it does. After a while it could build up past 10GB. Looked around for solution and no luck so far. What troubles me even more is that I always have ~900mb of ram inactive while the page files stack up and makes the browsing experience very unpleasant especially when I watch videos.

Anything I can do to fix these problems?

 

[GGJstudios]

I have a 15" 10' MBP with 4GBs of ram. I notice the page file builds up very quickly due to my heavy usage of firefox. It stutters my computer when it does. After a while it could build up past 10GB.

Unless you're running out of hard drive space, it's not a problem for your pagefile to be large. Look at Page Outs in Activity Monitor. If they're excessive, you either have a runaway process or you need more RAM for your normal workload. If all you're doing it surfing with Firefox, it's highly unlikely you need more RAM.

What troubles me even more is that I always have ~900mb of ram inactive while the page files stack up and makes the browsing experience very unpleasant especially when I watch videos.

Anything I can do to fix these problems?

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[exe163]

Thanks for the reply

I have a SSD as my boot drive and only 12GB of free space left. Space is not a big problem but at times I did reach a point which the swap files has completely taken over my hard drive and force me to restart.

Another thing is that when the system writes the swap, it makes my computer stutter. Which makes videos hardly watchable.

I don't have many programs opened. Usually just firefox ~1GB and Mail ~300. And yet, the computer still writes to the harddrive continuously causing it to slow down.

https://skitch.com/exe163/rm6sp/activity-monitor

 

[GGJstudios]

And yet, the computer still writes to the harddrive continuously causing it to slow down.

Make sure Spotlight isn't indexing, which could account for continuous HD usage: You can determine if it's indexing by the Menu Bar icon:

(not indexing)

(indexing)