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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Troubling amount of pageouts in Snow Leopard

Troubling amount of pageouts in Snow Leopard
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sek929
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Jan 27, 2012, 03:29 PM
 
So to make it short and sweet.

I have 4GB RAM in my iMac C2D 2.0ghz and recently ungraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard. After 17 days uptime I am now at around 220,000 pageouts, whereas in Leopard with that uptime I would be around 50,000...tops.

What gives?
     
chabig
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Jan 27, 2012, 03:54 PM
 
Does you machine behave OK? If so (and it probably does, right?) then don't worry about it. The OS is just doing its job.

By the way, where do you see pageouts and pageins in Lion? They no longer display it in Activity Monitor (which may be a clue that it's not important).
     
amazing
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:01 PM
 
plus, if the Mac is behaving OK, you can always just do a restart while you get a coffee of tea.
     
sek929  (op)
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:08 PM
 
Well I've noticed Flash bringing Safari to a crawl lately, but that's not necessary anything new.

I use iStat Pro widget to view all pertinent system information.

Also, as a sidenote, pagouts wouldn't be as much as a performance hit if I replaced the HDD with a SSD right?
     
Spheric Harlot
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by chabig View Post
By the way, where do you see pageouts and pageins in Lion? They no longer display it in Activity Monitor (which may be a clue that it's not important).
They're displayed in exactly the same place as they were in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

They're just no longer given as "pages", but as MB/GB.
     
Art Vandelay
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:14 PM
 
Originally Posted by chabig View Post
By the way, where do you see pageouts and pageins in Lion? They no longer display it in Activity Monitor (which may be a clue that it's not important).
Still there on mine.
Vandelay Industries
     
chabig
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:14 PM
 
Originally Posted by sek929 View Post
Well I've noticed Flash bringing Safari to a crawl lately, but that's not necessary anything new.
Agreed. In fact, I dumped Flash about a year ago. If I want to use a website that absolutely requires Flash, I drag the favicon over to Google Chrome (in my Dock) which has Flash built in. That way my system stays clean (from Flash) but I still have the capability when I need it, which is getting less and less. :-)

Originally Posted by sek929 View Post
I use iStat Pro widget to view all pertinent system information.
I have that widget too. I'm showing 2.3 million page ins and 140,000 page outs. My machine seems perfectly normal.

Originally Posted by sek929 View Post
Also, as a sidenote, pagouts wouldn't be as much as a performance hit if I replaced the HDD with a SSD right?
I think I would agree with that also. I put an SSD in a few months ago. I doubt that I would notice a small memory management tweak, but the overall speed of launching, copying, saving, etc. is tremendous!
     
chabig
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:16 PM
 
Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot View Post
They're displayed in exactly the same place as they were in Leopard and Snow Leopard.

They're just no longer given as "pages", but as MB/GB.
Right. I have that too. Snow Leopard and earlier showed the number of page outs and page ins in addition to the size.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Jan 27, 2012, 04:25 PM
 
What's the point of that additional info? Isn't the actual amount the relevant bit?
     
P
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Jan 27, 2012, 06:35 PM
 
Yes it is. I suspect that the number of pages was there as a transition thing, because people are used to looking at a page count. The change is because of a change in paradigm. It used to be that you usually picked the regular page size (4 KB) for everything, to save real memory, but recently programmers have been making more use of the "huge" page sizes to put less pressure on the TLB cache. To accurately reflect how the VM system is loaded, the reporting display was changed.

An SSD would reduce the cost of a page fault, and high page outs increase the risk of a page fault. but a memory upgrade helps much more than an SSD. If 4 GB is the ceiling, maybe you should consider saving the money for a new Mac.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
sek929  (op)
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Jan 27, 2012, 06:37 PM
 
At the time I bought this machine I believe there were no RAM sticks higher than 2GB, not sure if the limit of 4GB is intrinsic to my machine or if it was a limitation of the RAM tech at the time.

Also, no money for a new Mac, but I'm not opposed to opening her up to slap in a SSD one of these days.

Edit, just did a bit of sleuthing and people have been able to upgrade my machine to 6GB RAM with a 2GB and 4GB chip.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Jan 28, 2012, 05:31 AM
 
If it's the 2.0 GHz alu 20" model, yes, it will eat 6GB.
     
P
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Jan 28, 2012, 06:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by sek929 View Post
Also, no money for a new Mac, but I'm not opposed to opening her up to slap in a SSD one of these days.
An SSD is a great upgrade, but somewhat tricky to do if you want to keep the regular HDD as well, and if your problem is a large number of pageouts, a simpler RAM upgrade is your first step.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
   
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