Activity Monitor Question

CalebB

Registered
Ok so I read that page outs slow apps down and whatnot. My macbook pro had 4gb of ram when i first bought it and i recently upgraded it to 8gb, my question is, shouldn't i have 0 page outs if when i have the most apps open i probably will have, i still have a little under 4gb of ram free?

This is the info in my activity monitor:

page-ins: 965.5MB Free ram: 4.46GB
page-outs: 60.3MB Wired ram: 1.05Gb
Swap used: 15.9MB Active ram: 1.75GB
Inactive ram: 760MB
Used ram: 3.55GB
 
60.3MB of page-outs seems completely and absolutely normal for a system with 8GB of RAM. That is an extremely low amount of page-outs.

I wouldn't worry too much about your page-outs and RAM usage and what-not. Page-outs can and will occur even in some cases where you still have RAM available, and they're nothing to be concerned about unless you see a significant amount of them.

In other words, unless you're experiencing something that's concerning you (ultra slow operation, applications failing to launch, overall sluggish performance, etc.), then, for all intents and purposes, and from the data you posted, your computer is acting exactly as it should be and exhibits no sign of any problems.
 
for a benchmark:
running early 2011 13" MBP 16GB ram 2.3GHz i5
Uptime 11.5 days
Pageouts just under 942
3.7MB

so that's about ~85 pageouts a day for 16GB of ram.
 
Yep, which equates (roughly) to about 4k per pageout -- an extremely negligible amount.

If one is seeing pageouts in the gigabyte range, that may be cause for concern (or at least it would be curious), but might be normal depending on what you're doing and what applications you're using.

Mac OS X manages memory much differently from the OS 7/8/9 days. Fragmented memory is not an issue anymore, and pageins/outs occur even with gobs of RAM to spare.

New *NIX users typically get concerned about this due to curiosity, much like they do over log entries: "My logs have entries that say 'Warning: deprecated function call statf() -- falling back to cached mode' and 'Error: std_f not found in library, will reload on next call' -- WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY COMPUTER WITH ALL THESE ERRORS AND WARNINGS?!"

Nothing is wrong with your computer. Programs throw warnings and errors constantly, and they're written to do those things purposefully. For example, if you "Save As..." and then click "Cancel" to cancel the operation, a log entry "Warning: User cancelled operation, looping backward to initial starting point" may be generated (or something similar). It's a program's responsibility to handle warnings and errors gracefully, so looking at the log files and freaking out about "Warning" and "Error" messages is typically moot.

Same with memory. With the dichotomy between "active" and "inactive" memory, "wired" and "free," "paged" and "nonpaged," etc., unless you know what those mean, looking at the numbers beside them won't give you any indication of proper or improper memory usage. Unless the computer is acting funny, more than likely, the memory usage you're seeing is perfectly normal and any ill feelings about those numbers probably stems from lack of understanding, and not an operational problem.
 
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