Swapping way to often.

[Reelknead1]

I have a 15 i7 with 4gb of ram. I can't seem to make it through my normal day which is nothing intensive except maybe 1 or 2 compressions in handbrake without running out of RAM and swapping off my SSD.

I switched off safari and went to chrome which has helped a bit. Currently i have 713mb free but for some reason my computer is still swapping 9mb off the sdd, why does it insist on using my SSD. I don't see any speed difference when it starts to swap which is great but its going to kill the SSD overtime with all these writes.

Any ideas on why this would be doing it? Anyone else having this issue.

Programs running for a day:
Chrome - 5 to 10 tabs
Safari - sometimes but only 1 or 2 tabs
Itunes - open but not always playing
Pandora - through chrome
handbrake - once and a while compressing something
VLC
Word

I'm I being unreasonable to think that 4gb of ram would be alright for this many programs. I used to have a g4 with 2gb running leopard and never had an issue like this.

 

[paintballswimgu]

How often do you restart your web browsers. If you don't close them for a while, they can start to be massive ram hogs. ie. safari can start using gbs of ram if you don't shut it down and restart.

 

[Reelknead1]

I'm talking about turning it on in the morning and using safari or chrome through out the day. Having to restart the entire computer by 11pm, due to sometimes as much as 128mb swap off the SSD. There usually is half my ram, almost 2gb in the inactive section but never seems to do anything about it. When i check that section in activity monitor there is nothing that stands out either.

 

[Acasha]

I have a similar question but don't want to start a new thread... Just how much swap should you tolerate before needing an upgrade?

 

[dr. shdw]

Really? 9mbs? 128mbs?

Worry if it's above say 512mbs..

 

[CW Jones]

Psh 9mb? That's nothing, I have seen swap up into GB's!!! Your really not at a point of "needing" to upgrade RAM but you could if you had the extra $200 to blow. Also from what my friend says, swapping off a SSD is "better" than of a HDD.

 

[Reelknead1]

Psh 9mb? That's nothing, I have seen swap up into GB's!!! Your really not at a point of "needing" to upgrade RAM but you could if you had the extra $200 to blow. Also from what my friend says, swapping off a SSD is "better" than of a HDD.

Its only better in the fact that it doesn't slow the computer down as much as if you had a conventional hard drive. But swapping is not a good thing for an SSD because of all the writes that the drive has to make.

 

[Sankersizzle]

are SSD's really this fragile? The hard drive in my parents 2003 Dell Inspiron 1100 is still steaming away, I kind of expected an SSD to last longer.

 

[Eddyisgreat]

are SSD's really this fragile? The hard drive in my parents 2003 Dell Inspiron 1100 is still steaming away, I kind of expected an SSD to last longer.

SSDs aren't fragile. The cells they have do a limited number of writes available (sort of like the MTBF for HDD) but depending on the vendor and type (mlc, enterprise mlc, slc (good better best)) , and many chipsets integrate wear leveling at the hardware level to mitigate this.

But we still don't have TRIM :/