Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

El Maestro · Jun 19, 2005, 10:13 PM

I have a PB 17" 1.67 with 512 MB RAM. I'm running 10.4.1...lately I noticed that the system will slow down occasionally: graphics will be choppy, Safari will beachball, volume buttons will have a delayed response, etc. Nothing is hogging processor time from what I can see, and the machine is not running hot.

I did some research, and one thing that piqued my interest is pageouts. My uptime is currently 1 day and 9 hours, and I have 226,351 pageouts. From what I've been reading, this number is high. I run a few apps simultaneously: Finder, Dashboard, Safari, iTunes, Mail, Adium .82, and PalmDesktop.

Am I running so many at once that I have lots of pageouts and I slow my system? Perhaps I should pony up and add a gig of RAM. I'm new to Mac and would appreciate any feedback!

Catfish_Man · Jun 19, 2005, 10:19 PM

Hmm... yeah, that's pretty high. If you're comfortable with terminal try running top -o rsize, which will list all the open processes by how much ram they're using. top -au can also be useful, since it provides a running count of pageouts. If slowness corresponds with times when you get a lot of pageouts, then yeah, it's probably the cause. The other possible culprit I can think of is spotlight hogging disk access for a bit, which I've seen it do.

jay3ld · Jun 19, 2005, 10:55 PM

i get this sometimes in panther. i will be in safari for maybe 5 mins reading something or checking something then switch over to finder and its that familiar beachball i see.
i usally run. Finder, Safari, MSN Messenger, Mail, iTunes, Beklin USB Switch. and when im web editing Transmit, Textedit, Preview

I dont know what it is but if anyone has a clue i would like to know. i dont think the apps i run take to much memory. all those main ones but safari usally run in background while i do my stuff and dont use them much.

Heres the specs on the apps all but beklin usb switch.
PoweMac G4 - Added 80gb hd
Mac os 10.3.9
Safari 1.3
Finder 10.3.2
MSN Messenger 4.0.1
Mail 1.3.11
iTunes 4.8
Transmit 3.1
Textedit 1.3
Preview 2.1.0

bowwowman · Jun 20, 2005, 09:42 AM

ram, bam, thank ya ma'am

just do it,
you know ya wanna
just like everyone else!

mAxximo · Jun 21, 2005, 10:34 AM

You think 226,351 pageouts is high? Try 1,565,365 in just two days of uptime. I have 2GB RAM, 10.3.9. I'm running After Effects, Illustrator CS, Photoshop, Mail, Safari and iTunes. Talk about a disastrous memory management scheme. I'm restarting this POS right now.

CatOne · Jun 21, 2005, 11:35 AM

Originally Posted by mAxximo

You think 226,351 pageouts is high? Try 1,565,365 in just two days of uptime. I have 2GB RAM, 10.3.9. I'm running After Effects, Illustrator CS, Photoshop, Mail, Safari and iTunes. Talk about a disastrous memory management scheme. I'm restarting this POS right now.

Well, look long and hard at the Adobe products. And look at Photoshops "use half of all available RAM" default setting. If Illustrator starts, the two of them will try and pre-allocate half your ram each, leading to immediate paging.

Don't blame the OS. Those apps want to use lots of RAM. And Safari has a bit of a leak, it seems like.

Still, 1.5 million pageouts in 2 days using those apps isn't ridiculously high.

El Maestro · Jun 23, 2005, 06:19 PM

Well, I just added a gig of RAM, and the difference is pretty amazing. The system is much more responsive. Also, after six hours, zero pageouts. Safari is still a bit odd sometimes, but I know that has nothing to do with RAM. I decided to splurge for another gig after I ran all of the commands you suggested and didn't find much out of the ordinary. I guess my usage needed more RAM.

Thanks for all the advice!