[Aluminum]

I have lots of questions for a person that know exactly what page outs/page in's are and how they effect the actual hard disk and overall performance. I have 512 megs of ram and use activity monitor to monitor my ram usuage on this 1ghz tibook. What I have noticed is that after awhile there is tons of blue(inactive) memory, while its inactive its still using memory that could be used for other apps. Is this leakage memory or what? Once all the green(available) is gone on the pie chart the page outs begin, I have seen the number get as high as about 10374 then I restart the computer and start anew. Question is, how do they pageouts really effect the hard drive, is it bad for the hard drive to deal with page outs all the time? How many pageouts should you go through until you restart the machine. How can you cut back on the inactive memory usuage? I am probably going to get a 1 gig in this machine but I am still curious about these other questions. Someone with the knowledge please share some light. Any contructive input is appreciated. Thanks for you time.

[wadesworld]

Inactive memory is memory that is not being used and has been paged out to disk. So no, it's not bad and is not wasted memory.

More RAM is always better, so if you get the chance, buy some more. Beyond that, I think you're worrying too much.

Wade

[lenox]

It shouldn't be too expensive to double your ram in that tibook...and it would be well worth the price if it eased your worries.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Aluminum:
I have lots of questions for a person that know exactly what page outs/page in's are and how they effect the actual hard disk and overall performance. I have 512 megs of ram and use activity monitor to monitor my ram usuage on this 1ghz tibook. What I have noticed is that after awhile there is tons of blue(inactive) memory, while its inactive its still using memory that could be used for other apps. Is this leakage memory or what? Once all the green(available) is gone on the pie chart the page outs begin, I have seen the number get as high as about 10374 then I restart the computer and start anew. Question is, how do they pageouts really effect the hard drive, is it bad for the hard drive to deal with page outs all the time? How many pageouts should you go through until you restart the machine. How can you cut back on the inactive memory usuage? I am probably going to get a 1 gig in this machine but I am still curious about these other questions. Someone with the knowledge please share some light. Any contructive input is appreciated. Thanks for you time.

Pageouts are quite harmless. The only thing they hurt is performance, and that isn't hurt very much unless you're getting tons of them at once (I had mathematica eating all my ram once, and when I switched users, everything on that user had been paged out, so it lagged for a bit while it loaded it all again).

[wataru]

Do a search. This topic has been covered many, many times.

[neilw]

Originally posted by Aluminum:
Once all the green(available) is gone on the pie chart the page outs begin, I have seen the number get as high as about 10374 then I restart the computer and start anew. Question is, how do they pageouts really effect the hard drive, is it bad for the hard drive to deal with page outs all the time? How many pageouts should you go through until you restart the machine. How can you cut back on the inactive memory usuage?

I think you are suffering from a fundamental misconception of how a modern paged virtual memory system is supposed to work.

Each application can take as much memory as it wants. At some point, the applications will, in total, ask for more memory than the machine has RAM. That's when the paging mechanism kicks in. The system keeps track of which pages of memory are actively being used, and which aren't. The latter are moved to disk as necessary to make room for memory that is actively being used. This is a good thing. The "green" part of the memory is memory that is completely unused. In other words, it's basically being wasted.

Having more RAM installed will reduce how often the system needs to page, and the associated performance hit of moving memory to and from disk will be reduced as well. That's always a good thing of course. And you can run into a problem where the applications are trying to use so much memory at the same time that your system thrashes, trying to juggle memory on and off disk so frequently that it grinds to a crawl. In that case, you should quit one or more applications and/or install more memory.

But in general, pageouts and pageins are just the system doing its job, and little to be concerned about. The notion that you should reboot after a certain number of pageouts is misguided. And for the hard drive, it's just normal use.

Keep in mind that this type of memory system has for years been employed in Unix servers that don't reboot, well, hardly ever. Be thankful that with OSX, the Mac finally has a memory system that you don't really need to worry about. It's fine to keep an eye on it, of course, and make sure you don't thrash, and keep the super memory-hungry apps properly fed with RAM. But that's about it....

[hldan]

I have 1 GIG of Ram in my 17"PB Rev B and for the most part the iApps don't max out the memory, however when a lot of memory gets reserved in the "inactive" state and I try using VPC 6 then VPC 6 begins to run slower because I allocate 512MB to VPC for maximum performance and it eats up all available free unused memory.
I use Macjanitor daily to clear out the inactive memory and put it back in the unused state to free it for programs like VPC 6 and everything runs so much faster in VPC. This way a restart is not required to free reserved memory.
You can get Macjanitor at www.versiontracker.com and it's freeware. Very handy tool.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by hldan:
I have 1 GIG of Ram in my 17"PB Rev B and for the most part the iApps don't max out the memory, however when a lot of memory gets reserved in the "inactive" state and I try using VPC 6 then VPC 6 begins to run slower because I allocate 512MB to VPC for maximum performance and it eats up all available free unused memory.
I use Macjanitor daily to clear out the inactive memory and put it back in the unused state to free it for programs like VPC 6 and everything runs so much faster in VPC. This way a restart is not required to free reserved memory.
You can get Macjanitor at www.versiontracker.com and it's freeware. Very handy tool.

Macjanitor is a nice program, but if VPC can't figure out how to use inactive memory without a restart/macjanitor, then it's pretty messed up. I'm not even sure how I'd start making a program that did that.

[hldan]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Macjanitor is a nice program, but if VPC can't figure out how to use inactive memory without a restart/macjanitor, then it's pretty messed up. I'm not even sure how I'd start making a program that did that.

Make sure that you are allocating the "proper" amount of memory to VPC. If you allocate too much then it will eat up whats left of free memory and you may not need that much. If you have maxed out what VPC allows, I.E. (512MB Ram) then that may be way more than you need.
Here's a tip: Turn on the Activity Monitor and start up VPC and Windows. Watch how much Windows absorbs the free memory. If you have too much allocated then you will get page outs or come very close to getting a page out. Lower the amount of allocation and restart Windows and see if the behavior of Windows is the same speed. If you get really close to using up the free memory VPC will slow down dramatically.
I changed the allocation to 384MB from 512MB for Windows 2000 and I have Rev B 17" and the speed of Windows not only showed zippier performance but it stayed constant because it wasn't paging out. This is most effective way to manage memory until we can all afford 2 GIG Ram sticks.