Two million page outs in four hours - What the hell is going on?

[Fomaphone]

I'm worried about my machine. I'm not doing anything particularly RAM intensive-- just running Microsoft Word and iTunes and DVD Player.

I do have a boinc Rosetta project running, but there's no real reason for that to be completely bogging down my system either. it's set to run only while my system is idle, and is configured to use less than my system's max CPU, GPU, and RAM resources.

is this cause for concern? I typically see 0-300 page outs over the course of a day or two of light use, and i usually restart every 20,000 or so if i'm doing a lot of video work (about every 6 hours).

but i've never seen anything like this. 2.2 million since i turned my computer on around 6pm EST. i restarted it around an hour and a half ago and now i'm up to 35,000.

any thoughts?

 

[iBookG4user]

What does it say in Activity Monitor for the apps that you are running? Which has the highest amount of real memory used?

 

[Sun Baked]

Probably boinc ... you try turning it off. to see if the pageouts drop to a normal level.

Might be something with the latest OS update and boinc.

Personally would expect to see an error log full of "this call has been deprecated" or something similar instead of pageouts.

 

[Fomaphone]

it's got to be boinc. what a bummer-- i really wanted to chip in but i can't risk data loss/screwing up my machine.

activity monitor says i'm using 5.98gb of my 6gb RAM. it shows about 400mb in use by each of 10 instances of the rosetta project.

even though it's showing about 20-100mb free from moment to moment, the page outs are still climbing somewhat rapidly... up to 49,000 now. so, 15,000 in a few minutes.

 

[J the Ninja]

it's got to be boinc. what a bummer-- i really wanted to chip in but i can't risk data loss/screwing up my machine.

activity monitor says i'm using 5.98gb of my 6gb RAM. it shows about 400mb in use by each of 10 instances of the rosetta project.

even though it's showing about 20-100mb free from moment to moment, the page outs are still climbing somewhat rapidly... up to 49,000 now. so, 15,000 in a few minutes.

Sign up for something else, like Folding@Home. It has an SMP Intel-based client.

(If you aren't sure what to put for team #, just put down 168881. )

 

[Eithanius]

I'm running BOINC with Einstein@home on my Mac Pro with all 16 logical cores dedicated 16 instances of Einstein core clients, and I've got 10GB of RAM. Each client only uses 100MB for a total of 1.6GB RAM. I fail to see why BOINC could hog that much RAM on your system.

What project are you in to...?

EDIT: Got it, Rosetta@home... Guess I missed that sentence of yours.

You might wanna check Activity Monitor and find out how much RAM does a single Rosetta client takes.

 

[Fomaphone]

i'm starting to think that there's something wrong with my machine. my page outs have been climbing to astronomical levels since i installed snow leopard. rendering an HD(1280x1080 23.98, 32BPC, 90-second) clip in after effects with minimal compositing and no color work (open GL enabled is better but still bad) is taking 2-3 times longer than it used to, and causing about 2 million page outs. AE tells me that it's using 55% of the 3gb i've allotted it-- when i was allotting it 5 of my 6GB of RAM it was actually going much slower.

AE and Safari are the only things open right now. FCP, Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox, Itunes, and Bridge were open a little while ago, but that was when the PO's were around 36000 and climbing to around 70,000.

am i shortening the lives of my internal disks by not upgrading my RAM? should i drop the $500 on 12GB of 4gb sticks?