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Page in, page out, swap used?
- Thread starter kat.hayes
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How long since you last restarted your Mac? You don't need to track page ins, as you will always have those. The only thing to watch is page outs. To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. 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. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
lots of programs have trouble releasing ram, as well. so if you haven't restarted in a LONG time, you may have page outs even if you don't actually "need" more ram.
I don't believe that's entirely true. Apps request and release ram, apps can and do cause resource issues when they have memory leaks. Safari for years had memory leaks where memory would be allocated and never released.
ok.
what does it mean when one is still having page-outs, showing about 100 megs of free ram, no applications running, and 14ish gigs are tied up in "inactive" ?
as in, page-outs increase when i start an application in this state.
what does it mean when one is still having page-outs, showing about 100 megs of free ram, no applications running, and 14ish gigs are tied up in "inactive" ?
as in, page-outs increase when i start an application in this state.