**HELP!! Sluggish system with VERY high page ins, outs, VM size, and Swap used!!**

A

AngryStamen

Registered
I'm hoping someone can help me with this. I routinely have a sluggish system, where programs hang and I get the spinning beach ball of death!

I have a Macbook Pro, 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3. I usually run it 24/7, meaning that at night I put it to sleep, as opposed to shutting down or restarting. (This may be the root of my problems, let me know, please!)

I currently have the following numbers under System Memory in my Activity Monitor:

  • VM size: 244.78 GB
  • Page ins: 31.67 GB
  • Page outs: 5.27 GB
  • Swap used: 4.35 GB

Are these outrageously large? Is the only solution to shutdown/restart? I like to keep my computer running because I will regularly have multiple safari windows open, each with multiple tabs, as I research a variety of things, (and never finish one of them!)

Any input on this is appreciated, thank you!!
 
Activity Monitor will also show you your processes. Make sure the drop down is changed from My Processes to All Processes. You can sort that process list by clicking on the header. Sort by Memory, or by %CPU, or by Virtual Memory - and you'll see the top few items will be the big resource users on your Mac (likely Safari will be at least one of those)
A quick trick that can help is to occasionally close your Safari windows, then click on the Safari menu, and choose Empty Cache...
Quit Safari, then reopen Safari.
Or - let us know if you have something else that's a resource hog.
You may also find out that the Flash plugin is a primary source for your performance issues, so look for that in the list. In that case, something like Click2Flash might help you quite a bit.
If you have questions about specific processes, you can ask about those here, too.
 
First, how much RAM do you have installed?

Second, If you don't have very much free RAM and a high Page Out number, you need more RAM or an upgrade.

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have available to use – the higher the better. If you have no free memory you should get more RAM.

A Page out means your computer has run out of memory and had to use some of the Hard Disk instead of RAM. (This is the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up some headspace) This DRAMATICALLY slows down your computer.
 
OP states that there's 4GB in the MacBook Pro.
That's a fairly large amount, but more can help, too.
I'm guessing that's a mid-2010 MBPro, which can be upgraded to 8GB....
 
AngryStamen said:
...

I currently have the following numbers under System Memory in my Activity Monitor:

  • VM size: 244.78 GB
  • Page ins: 31.67 GB
  • Page outs: 5.27 GB
  • Swap used: 4.35 GB

Are these outrageously large? ...
Click to expand...
Two questions:
  1. What capacity hard drive?
  2. How much free hard drive capacity?
 
1. Launch /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor and see if a process is running away, then delete the process and uninstall that application with the free AppCleaner, or update that application & check Activity monitor again to make sure it is not running away again.

2. Then run a software cleaner application like either the free Onyx or the shareware YASU. Run all the cleaning routines and let the program reboot the Mac. Then upon that reboot by the cleaning program, immediately manually reboot again to completely rebuild your startup/shutdown cache.

3. Reset Your Pram.

4. Buy new RAM sticks to see if they help. RAM is cheap right now.

5. Update you OS X version to the latest of Software Update.

Also read the apple article Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck and run the fsck section. See if the hard drive is going south.

Good Luck.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top