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Page ins / Page outs

B

barcode00

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 25, 2010
86
56
Hullo,

Are my Page ins / Page outs considered abnormal?

I realise it may be hard to define what is normal or not, so I have included my 'About this Mac'. I would not say I spend my time observing the Activity Monitor, so I am not sure whether this reading is unusual. I am only basing this on what I have seen elsewhere.

I'm referring to this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1260207/.

Thanks,

screenshot20111022at021.png


http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/4700/screenshot20111022at022.png
 
Oh s***! That's allot of page outs! I had 4gigs of pages outs yesterday but since I upgraded to 6GB's of RAM today my machine is allot faster (though I need to get my fans fixed).
 
whoa that's a lot... what's the uptime on that thing?
 
Last edited:
rovyjh said:
Are my Page ins / Page outs considered abnormal?
Click to expand...
First, you don't need to worry about page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may or may not have page outs, which indicate you're maxing out your RAM. Be aware that those numbers are cumulative since your last restart. Restart your computer to reset those values to zero, then monitor your page outs under your normal workload. If you have excessive page outs (around 1GB or more) during normal use, you may benefit from additional RAM. iStat Pro can track your computer uptime, memory usage, etc.
 
GGJstudios said:
First, you don't need to worry about page ins. You will always have page ins, but you may or may not have page outs, which indicate you're maxing out your RAM. Be aware that those numbers are cumulative since your last restart. Restart your computer to reset those values to zero, then monitor your page outs under your normal workload. If you have excessive page outs (around 1GB or more) during normal use, you may benefit from additional RAM. iStat Pro can track your computer uptime, memory usage, etc.
Click to expand...

so can MenuMeters, if you want something that sits on your menu bar.
 
Ok, so I understand Page In's don't matter. So, why does he have page out's if he still has plenty of ram to spare?
 
macuser1232 said:
Ok, so I understand Page In's don't matter. So, why does he have page out's if he still has plenty of ram to spare?
Click to expand...
The page outs occurred at an earlier time, when there was no available RAM. Page outs are cumulative, since the last restart. Once you have page outs, that number won't go back to zero until you restart the computer, even if you're no longer paging out.
 
Also I have about 16gb page outs in the past 3 days of using my computer without shutting down. Honestly, I haven't noticed anything affecting my computer at all. A lot of people seem to be like "amg pageouts death death amg" but I wouldn't have noticed anything if I didn't check activity monitor.
 
shamash said:
Also I have about 16gb page outs in the past 3 days of using my computer without shutting down. Honestly, I haven't noticed anything affecting my computer at all. A lot of people seem to be like "amg pageouts death death amg" but I wouldn't have noticed anything if I didn't check activity monitor.
Click to expand...
You may or may not notice the slower performance due to paging activity. Performance is definitely degraded during paging, which is limited to drive read/write speed, which is much slower than RAM, even with a SSD. Whether you notice it or not is another matter.
 
The programs you are using may create a lot of page out and a large swap file also. I've monitored my page outs and swap file while running aperture and my page outs and swap file increases but I never run out of Ram.... it's weird. Hopefully this will be address in the next update of Aperture but something to be aware of.

P.S. I have 8GB of ram and the max aperture usually uses is about 3-3.25GB.
 
wytwolf said:
The programs you are using may create a lot of page out and a large swap file also. I've monitored my page outs and swap file while running aperture and my page outs and swap file increases but I never run out of Ram.... it's weird. Hopefully this will be address in the next update of Aperture but something to be aware of.

P.S. I have 8GB of ram and the max aperture usually uses is about 3-3.25GB.
Click to expand...
As I said in the other thread you started about this:
GGJstudios said:
Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so it's likely they occurred when you didn't have free or inactive memory available. The swap used amount may vary as paging activity increases or declines, but will not return to zero until a restart. Try tracking it while you're running Aperture and you'll probably see that at the time page outs increase, there is no free/inactive memory available.
Click to expand...
 
GGJstudios said:
You may or may not notice the slower performance due to paging activity. Performance is definitely degraded during paging, which is limited to drive read/write speed, which is much slower than RAM, even with a SSD. Whether you notice it or not is another matter.
Click to expand...

I think it's just a perk of how fast the Macbook Air is. On my 2006 Macbook 1,1 with 1gb of ram, I definitely notice running out of ram and a lot of beachballs. I've had nothing of the sort on the Macbook Air. Even if a SSD is slower than RAM, it's fast enough for me to not notice it, which is good enough in my book. I understand the idea that you need more ram, but I just don't agree with it I guess.
 
shamash said:
I understand the idea that you need more ram, but I just don't agree with it I guess.
Click to expand...
It's not so much that you need more RAM; it's that performance could be improved with more RAM. Whether or not you feel like you need that improvement is another matter.
 
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