What's the deal with page swapping?

michaelsanford

michaelsanford

Translator, Web Developer
I understand the idea of a swap file, using the HD as extra RAM and all that.

I was wondering, however, what a "page" is talking about memory? Is it a portion of the stack (hence the nickname)?

Since using iPulse I've noticed TONNES of pageouts (swapping from disk, right?) which with my 786 megs of ram is a little surprising.

Thanks!
 
A "page" is 4k of data. But when OS X has to "page out" (transfer data from RAM to the hard drive), it creates swapfiles of 80 MB. So you can fit a lot of pages into one swapfile!
The fact that you're seeing more page-outs since running iPulse is a pretty good hint that iPulse has a memory leak. :(
As for not seeing page-ins, that's just because the particular data that has been transferred to disk hasn't been needed for any active process (yet).
 
Great answer thanks!

PS. the only reason I noticed more pageouts with iPulse is because I never checked for them before...hehe I didn't mean necessarily that the pageouts were correlated with my use of iPulse, though it did look that way.
 
Originally posted by michaelsanford
I understand the idea of a swap file, using the HD as extra RAM and all that.

I was wondering, however, what a "page" is talking about memory? Is it a portion of the stack (hence the nickname)?

Since using iPulse I've noticed TONNES of pageouts (swapping from disk, right?) which with my 786 megs of ram is a little surprising.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

*Voice of Jerry Seinfeld* What's WITH...all these pages? And WHY....are they swapping? :D

Whatever it does man...just throw more ram at it! More ram! More ram! That'll fix what ail's ya! We've got like 1.5gigs of ram to fill....what ELSE are ya gonna do with underused ram banks? hehe
 
OmegaMan: :p

Yeah you know what, you remind me of Bill Gates with all the RAM tossing going on ;)

On a serious note, I'm a student, and I've got an iMac TFT, so RAM is bloody expensive! Plus I figure since most of what I do is just web site design and local testing with MySQL/PHP4 and apache, and word processing, and MarineAquarium, 786 ought`a be enough for a while hehe.

Still waiting on Jag though!
 
thanks for TELLING me the reason for all of those. just kicked iPulse and found that the original Mac OS X application Clock.app is still hidden (erhm, I've only forgot about it, I guess) inside 'Applications'. Now I've got the perfect desktop clock back again. It only needs a 'float on top' and 'no action on mouse' preference. Anybody want to create me a freeware? (I don't want to pay a shareware fee for THAT, I guess...)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top