VM size

[ecksmen]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to OSX, having only had my macbook for a month or so. I noticed the other day, that the Virtual Memory size it massive. Weighing in at a hudge 9 something GB! I've linked in a screen shot so you can see exactly what is running.

It seems very excessive, considering I'm only running a few lightweight apps and that I have 2GB of RAM!

http://hosting.flamingeck.com/vm.tiff

Is this normal?

It's worth noting that I have just done a fresh install. However VM usage is about the same as before...

 

[Scarlet Fever]

yeah that sounds about right. My VM size is 8.49GB.

As long as you have ~10GB of free HDD space all the time, you won't notice any slowdowns.

 

[ecksmen]

Thanks, but I do see the spinning beach ball thing a lot, which I can't but think must be down to slow harddrive access, but I always thought more ram meant this happens less, yet the VM size for each of those programs seems stupidly high. 400mb+ for a program that's only 20mb in size?

 

[MisterMe]

MacOS X automatically makes the optimal setting of vritual memory based on your RAM requirements and available hard drive space. There is nothing to worry about and nothing that you can do if you do.