Odd Page Outs – bad RAM??

[eric halfabee]

Hi, I know that there are many posts and articles on memory handling especially Page Ins/Outs and I generally understand what is going on but I think I'm having some strange behavior with my MBP.

I have a 17" MBP mid 2009 model with 4GB RAM running 10.6.2. I run Adobe CS4 applications most of the time and know that they will take up a lot of RAM such as PS. I have been getting major Page Outs which I sort of expect when using CS4 but even after a restart and opening only a few apps I'm still get Page Outs.

For example at the moment I have Safari with five tabs (big memory hog), Mail, Adobe Acrobat, InDesign and Illustrator open. I have one file open in both Illustrator and InDesign both pretty basic in content. I restarted about 30 mins ago. This is what my memory usage shows - see attached image.

The thing I did notice is that I had about 750MB Free memory with no Page Outs before I opened Illustrator then it dropped to about 680MB and the Page Outs went up to 163.

Is this normal as I'm thinking I have bad RAM?

Thanks in advance.

Eric

 

[DeltaMac]

Do you think page outs should _always_ be zero, and never have any?
160 is not 'major Page Outs'...
add a couple of zeroes.
16,000 would be closer to major

I think that pageouts are not that relevant, unless you are having performance problems. Are you actually having slowdowns, or long periods of the 'rotating cursor' while you wait?

 

[eric halfabee]

Hi DeltaMac, yes I know that 160 is low – I,ve been up to over 300,000 in the past and I'm now after just checking, at over 149,000 (showing 1.5GB free) and haven't been doing anything for the last couple of hours or opened any other programs.

 

[eric halfabee]

Oh and yes I have been getting slow downs, nothing extreme but annoying.

Cheers

 

[DeltaMac]

I doubt that you are having a hardware (RAM) problem, but a few runs with memtest might give you more assurance about that.
Maybe try a few things:
Are you considering adding more RAM?
Boot to your restore DVD, and run Disk Utility, then Repair Disk, just to verify that you are not having problems with the file system.
Monitor your Activity Monitor, for high CPU, and RAM usage spikes.
Reinstall the combined 10.6.2 updater.
There's a 10.6.3 update coming soon. If there are fixes for RAM usage, then you may see some improvement then...

 

[eric halfabee]

Thanks, I'm currently trying to find if I have a process/s thats being greedy maybe its just me being fussy. Will try the memtest and your other suggestions too and yes I am thinking of adding more RAM. Its just bugging me rather than a major issue.

Cheers