[mpancha]

I was trying to uninstall Adobe CS2, and step one of the directions is to kill a process using Activity MOnitor. When I pulled up Activity Monitor I noticed that I had a 10 GB VM. I figured maybe its because I've been opening and closing a lot of programs, and also left a lot of them running for a few days, so I restarted. After the restart... I'm "down" to an 8 GB VM. I have 2GB ram in this machine, and I also noticed that before the restart I had almost 1 GB available, and after a restart I have 1.5 GB available.

What's going on here? My MBP has a 120 GB drive, of it I have 50 GB free, but it seems to me I should have 60 if my VM is taking up almost 10. I realize 50 is a lot, but I need 30 for virtual machines I plan to run in VM Ware (not to be confused with VM as in memory), leaving me with only 20GB available after all is said and done.

Anyone have a layman's explanation for why my Virtual Memory size is so high?

ETA: here are before and after screenshots. First is before a restart, second is after a restart.

[SpaceMonkey]

Don't worry about the "VM Size" figure. It is NOT consuming that much disk space (this thread goes into why). The important stats are the sum of "wired" and "active" memory (this is memory that it actually being used), and the ratio of page outs to page ins (too many page outs means that your computer is often having to page out data in RAM to your hard disk). In the screenshots that you posted, neither of those figures seems to be out of whack to me.

If it helps you to have a comparision, I have 1 GB of RAM in my PowerBook, which I use for "light" tasks like iTunes, web browsing, email, Word, etc. I rarely restart. I'm running Camino, Adium, and iTunes right now and my memory stats are:

Wired: 110 MB
Active: 272 MB
Inactive: 249 MB
Free: 392 MB
VM size: 6.56 GB
Page ins/outs: 82282/1509.

Don't worry about it.

[mpancha]

Makes sense, thanks for the link with the explanation.

It would be nice if Apple properly reported VM, or rather took out the VM stat and instead showed size of swap file. Seems to me that that's a more valuable piece of information.

But, end of the day, if its not eating up my hard drive even better. Thing that puzzles me, and this is off topic, how did I manage with a 30GB drive for 5+ years on my ibook, and now have 120 of which over half is used.

[jmiddel]

Well, mpancha, what do you have on the HD that was not there using the iBook? more music, perhaps? Complex Adobe files? Do you have Gargeband installed? Its sample files alone are close to 2Gigs in size. I had a 10G iBook and got along fine back then, with at least 25% of the HD empty so as not to run into problems, but now I have tons of audio files and pictures, so I'm using about 40G. Funny how we just fill up HD space just because we can

[Catfish_Man]

Check the size of the /var/vm folder if you want to see the swapfile size (or just get menumeters).

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by mpancha 

It would be nice if Apple properly reported VM, or rather took out the VM stat and instead showed size of swap file. Seems to me that that's a more valuable piece of information.

They do properly report VM, it's just that you don't understand how the VM subsystem works