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Searched but cannot find solution to Page outs vs Inactive memory problem

I

iamsilvermember

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 27, 2007
19
0
Attached is screen shot of memory allocation on my computer. Even there are many GB's of memory inactive, there are no more free ram, page outs is still being utilized...

I went as far as unloading/disabling dynamic pager by using the command:

sudo launchtl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Which successfully avoided "Swap Used" without any problem after many days of test, but I don't understand why "Page outs" is still huge consider there are so much free ram...

Any suggestion or idea?

Thanks in advance!
 

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It's possible that this is normal. While inactive memory essentially equates to bring free, there's no guarantee that giving inactive memory to an application is free - that is, it requires memory in order to clean certain blocks of memory before passing it on. And since you have a small amount of free memory, it needs to page other unused blocks in order to do this.

Of course, this is speculative until someone who knows the internal memory management system of OS X can confirm or deny this, but I don't think this will happen any time soon.
 
iamsilvermember said:
Attached is screen shot of memory allocation on my computer. Even there are many GB's of memory inactive, there are no more free ram, page outs is still being utilized...

I went as far as unloading/disabling dynamic pager by using the command:

sudo launchtl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

Which successfully avoided "Swap Used" without any problem after many days of test, but I don't understand why "Page outs" is still huge consider there are so much free ram...

Any suggestion or idea?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

500 MB of pagein/out is _nothing_. Stop worrying.
 
I believe the answer is your usage of Vuze.

Torrent clients seem to cache the files they are actively uploading in RAM. I've noticed the same behavior with Transmission.

If you close down Vuze you'll see that RAM slowly get collected by OS X and reallocated to either active or free memory.
 
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