UMBP w/ 8GB RAM Paging out constantly

[percival504]

Hi, all and TIA for any responses and advice. I have a 17" 2.93 UMBP w/ 8GB RAM. I have two X25-Es as boot drives and use an external 1TB Caviar Black as my home folder. I rum virtual machine from the external.

My question is this: is it abnormal for a machine with 8GB of OWC RAM to page out (right now at 2:02 after boot page outs are at 421.5 MB). Usage is moderate (Safari, iTunes and a Parallels VM with 512 MB virtual RAM assigned). I'm thinking my RAM is either crap or defective any constructive and informed thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

[geoffreak]

Are you using iStat to monitor RAM usage?

Macs will always have a page file. It just isn't used very much if you have more RAM.

Even if you have RAM free, your page file will be used to keep some of the less important background processes from taking up RAM, thereby allowing your important programs to run faster.

 

[percival504]

Tks, geoffreak. I'm using Activity Monitor.

I would expect pages (particularly page ins), but even with my 4,1 Santa Rosa with 6 GB RAM I didn't see page out very often. I talked to the guys at OWC and they agreed that it was very unusual and asked that I run the Hardware Test. I'll do that and report the results.

 

[Thiol]

My question is this: is it abnormal for a machine with 8GB of OWC RAM to page out (right now at 2:02 after boot page outs are at 421.5 MB). Usage is moderate (Safari, iTunes and a Parallels VM with 512 MB virtual RAM assigned). I'm thinking my RAM is either crap or defective any constructive and informed thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Is it possible that the page outs you are seeing are in your VM? After all, there is only 512 MB of RAM assigned there... Do you get any page outs with Parallels off?

 

[geoffreak]

The VM would use its own page file within the VM storage, not in Mac OSX's RAM.

 

[fehhkk]

It would be good to see how much free RAM you have after running the VM, Safari and iTunes. Also, iStat has Active/Inactive/Wired/Free memory stats pegs.