[reemas]

with 512mb of ram built in the iMac 20" i own was as bad as my ibook g3 running panther. It was hard to run more than 2 apps at once.

after adding 1 gb more (1.5 total) this is finally what i expected.

anyone know what the pageins and pageouts value's represent? all i know is now i have 0 pageouts.

before my ratio was 2 pageins for every 1 pageout.

[osxrules]

Pageouts are not necessarily a bad thing but less is better. I have 1GB Ram and a 2:1 page-in/out ratio. You really have to watch for rapid increases in pageouts because it means you don't have enough RAM. If you leave OS X running for days (if not weeks) on end and use memory intensive apps like me then you get quite a lot. I heard Safari causes a lot of paging but I don't know.