Page In / Page Outs

[mossimo]

hello, i'm experiencing a huge amounts of pageouts. For example, right now its 557 MB page outs to 401 MB page in. This doesnt seem right. Should i be concerned. I am planning on upgrading my RAM to 4 gigs ASAP. Is this an indication that i dont have enough memory for my user needs?

 

[mckyvlle]

Yep, looks like you have run out of memory.

Looking at your MacBook's specs, certainly recommended to upgrade from the 1gb you have now.

 

[macbooker15]

Yep, your out of memory, I just bumped from 1 GB to 2 GB and right now im at..861.44mb page ins with NO page outs. Btw 4 GB is overkill, you will do just fine with 2 GB.

 

[logana]

Yes - you need more memory.

I think a ratio of 4 page-ins to 1 page-out is ok but your ratio is almost 1:1.

Are you using PhotoShop by any chance ?

 

[mossimo]

No i'm not using photoshop. But i do usually run ical. mail. skype, safari, address book. sometimes open office, give or take a few. So you really dont think i should max out memory, its pretty cheap and dont want to do it again. I dont know. Thanks for the replies by the way.

 

[logana]

If you want to and is cheap enough then go for the full 4GB. You would probably "manage" with 2GB but no doubt Snow Leopard will use more....

 

[IJ Reilly]

Page In/Page Out ratios are the voodoo flavor of the month. The only way to really tell if your Mac is borrowing hard drive space is to check your virtual memory swap files. But the real bottom line is you probably only need more RAM when you can detect a slowdown. Otherwise, what's the point?

 

[eyazdchi]

just curious, can anybody explain why page outs are bad?

presently im at 371,340 page in, and 0 page outs.

 

[r.j.s]

just curious, can anybody explain why page outs are bad?

presently im at 371,340 page in, and 0 page outs.

Memory is broken up into pages, when a program calls anything it is brought into RAM as a page (or several). That is a page in. As long as you have free memory, you can keep calling pages in, the memory manager will overwrite pages that are no longer needed (if that program was closed, for example). If you there are enough programs running that the total memory needed is more than what you have, then every time a new page is needed, an older one must be written to disk - where it will be called back later. That is a page out.

So ... if you have page outs, you have run out of memory, but this is not necessarily bad - unless it is happening all the time. You can tell by the ratio of page ins to page outs.