Page outs, and slowness

[Rafalski24]

Hello
So I posted a few days ago about slowness of my uMBP, and now I have noticed that the page outs are getting out of control:
320,000ins
144,000outs
with only 65% of my 4GB used.
I am assuming thats not good...
Anyone have any insights. I did a rough memory check and it came out okay (using rember)

thanks

 

[alphaod]

What are you doing when the computer becomes slow?

 

[Rafalski24]

pretty standard stuff, firefox with a bunch of tabs (10-20), entourage, iTunes, Transmission. And sometimes playing stuff in VLC. With all of that open it says its using 70% of its Memory.

 

[Thiol]

Any virtual machines going?

 

[m85476585]

Where are you getting these percent numbers? What does Activity Monitor say?

 

[Rafalski24]

I am not running any virtual machines, and I was using iStat pro

 

[ayeying]

When was the last time you restarted?

 

[mikes70mustang]

When was the last time you restarted?

+1, and i always love these threads, "lots of pages outs, i have a bunch of stuff open, i dont understand"

 

[Rafalski24]

I didn't used to have a problem with page outs, and I don't consider 4 or 5 applications a lot considering I have 4GB of RAM... But I have realized maybe I do need 8GB now, which is unfortunate because I don't have 400 bucks laying around to buy it.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

FireFox is a real memory hog and has problems with memory leaks when left open for too long. Close FireFox every now and then and your situation should improve.

Also, restarting every now and then, as mentioned, helps too.

 

[iSee]

If the page outs/ins aren't shooting up while your mac is slow, lack of RAM isn't causing the problem. Monitor the stats while you mac is slow -- don't want you to spend $$$ if it isn't going to help the problem.

 

[Rafalski24]

is that memory leaking problem specific to Firefox, are safari or chrome better at this. Firefox seams to deal with silverlight better than any other browser which is why I am currently using it. But if the others wouldn't cause my system to bog down...

 

[m85476585]

Chrome was much worse than Firefox for me, at least in terms of overall stability and usability. I have a huge bookmarks file, and I regularly keep 50-100 tabs open. I installed Chrome and tried to open all the tabs I had saved from my Firefox session, and it brought Chrome to a halt. Even just trying to navigate bookmarks beachballed it for several seconds, and when I tried to open 80 tabs, Chrome was unresponsive for 15 minutes and I had to force quit it. I regularly do all this in Firefox with no problems besides occasionally high memory use.

Safari is OK, but it doesn't handle large numbers of tabs that well, and I missed some of my extensions.