Weird memory usage?

[storage]

I know this kind of thing has been up millions of times, but I just found my memory usage to be really, really strange.

I have an uptime of approximately 5 hours and 10 minutes.



Almost 53000 pageouts, 1.18 GB active memory but the process list shows only a few houndred used?

Should I be worried? What can it be that causes this?

Thanks in advance!

 

[WildCowboy]

It seems pretty normal to me. You've definitely been busy though to accumulate that many page ins/outs in the last five hours.

You've got about 1.2 GB in use. Note that you are currently showing only your processes. Switch to "All Processes" in the drop-down menu and you'll see a lot more. You've currently got plenty of available memory (~500 MB inactive and ~200 MB free) at the moment, but since you have some page outs, you were running at a higher level at some point. But it all looks pretty normal to me.

 

[bousozoku]

You're in great shape compared to most people using Intel-based machines who have posted statistics here. Most I've seen have more page outs than page ins.

As WildCowboy said, show All processes to get the bigger picture. You're missing kernel_task which generally takes a lot of real memory.

 

[storage]

Oh thanks, it had me worried there for a bit! The machine can slow down almost to a halt sometimes when starting/shutting down Parallels.

Didn't know I was just viewing my processes, not that Mac-savvy yet , but I'm learning!

kernel_task actually uses only ~90 MB real memory, but also 1.12 GB virtual.

Thanks once again .

 

[plinden]

You're in great shape compared to most people using Intel-based machines who have posted statistics here. Most I've seen have more page outs than page ins.

In general, the page outs on my 2GB Intel iMac are pretty low (no more than a couple of thousand after several days use), but as soon as I run Parallels ... bam!

 

[bousozoku]

In general, the page outs on my 2GB Intel iMac are pretty low (no more than a couple of thousand after several days use), but as soon as I run Parallels ... bam!

I hope that's not a surprise to you. It's not as if Parallels or Windows isn't a rather large piece of software and putting them together with Mac OS X should shove any applications' memory out to disk.

 

[plinden]

I hope that's not a surprise to you. It's not as if Parallels or Windows isn't a rather large piece of software and putting them together with Mac OS X should shove any applications' memory out to disk.

No, not surprised. I just wanted to point out that, although it may at times generate a lot of page out, it's not because it's an Intel Mac.

 

[bousozoku]

No, not surprised. I just wanted to point out that, although it may at times generate a lot of page out, it's not because it's an Intel Mac.

Still, a lot of people aren't using Parallels, and it didn't seem to be running on any of the systems I've seen. Rosetta is a typical problem for everyone, though, as are HP printer drivers.