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Grrr · Sep 22, 2005, 09:40 PM

My 12" 1ghz G4 powerbook has been getting awful slow after a short period of use. Lots of beach balling, especially with Safari.
Running 10.4.2 with 768mb of ram, 40gig hd with over 3gig free (enough?).
I don't often shut the Mac down, instead putting it to sleep at night. It was only restarted yesterday tho, and look at this..

Safari is taking up a lot load of ram. And even more ridiculous amounts of virtual memory (i've seen it take even more than this before tho). I've had this happen a lot since upgrading to 10.4 from 10.3 But curiously enough, it doesn't seem to happen on my G5 iMac at all (10.4.2 1gig ram).
Usually restarting safari seemed to ease the situation, But i noticed the system was still being slower than it should.. So only today I noticed (also shown in the screen shot) this 'Kernal task' thing.. And this is taking up even more virtual memory. I have no idea what it is, But I notice my G5 iMac doesn't show 'Kernal task' in the activity monitor at all. In fact, the activity monitor on the powerbook shows many things are taking up more virtual memory than I think they should (Im not running any meaty apps either, its just an internet machine mostly, so runs safari, mail, ichat etc).
Its quite bad in that I have to restart the powerbook every few days to fix it. Where as on 10.3 it would run for well over a month with ease, without needing a restart.
For the record tho, the powerbook has been 100% stable. Not crashed once since I bought it nearly 2 years ago.
Still, this virtual memory issue is annoying..
Clues/suggestions anyone?

Detrius · Sep 22, 2005, 09:58 PM

1) Supposedly, there are a freaking huge number of memory-leak fixes coming for 10.4.3.

2) Safari has always used too much RAM... most of the memory leaks are WebKit/Java related, and therefore they will apply to Safari.

3) That Virtual Memory figure isn't what you think it is. As far as I'm aware ( I haven't looked into it in a while ), this includes all shared libraries. My suspicion is that this means it includes all of the binary code that is still on the hard drive--not necessarily the stuff in your swap files.

4) All machines have a kernel_task. If you don't see it, then it's being filtered out by your Activity Monitor settings. Your machine won't run without the kernel.

Grrr · Sep 23, 2005, 07:10 AM

Many thanks Detrius. I did suspect it was an OS issue, and probably wasn't something I could do much about. Still, I was curious why it didn't seem to happen on my G5 iMac. However, that doesn't get used as much as this PowerBook.
Something I did wonder though.. The total amount of virtual memory use is often listed as more than the amount of free hd space I have. How can that be possible? And could it be part of the issue? Still, even when the pb had more space available, Safari still took all the virtual memory it could get pretty quickly, and slowed things down, and beach balled a lot.

Randman · Sep 23, 2005, 07:25 AM

Empty and deactivate the cache in Safari. Empty and deactivate the favicons in Safari. Edit down Autofill entries, edit down and deactivate Autofill > Others. Purge your unread RSS feeds.

ism · Sep 23, 2005, 07:42 AM

Hey, keep an eye on the hard drive as well. My exact same pb start getting really really slow because the hard drive was going. It slowed down before smart reporter picked it up as well.

msuper69 · Sep 23, 2005, 08:07 AM

Originally Posted by Grrr

...
Something I did wonder though.. The total amount of virtual memory use is often listed as more than the amount of free hd space I have. How can that be possible? ...

VM is using disk space. It has nothing to do with the amount of free disk space. But if the OS needs more VM and you don't have enough free disk space available, you will have problems.

Detrius · Sep 24, 2005, 01:34 PM

Originally Posted by msuper69

VM is using disk space. It has nothing to do with the amount of free disk space. But if the OS needs more VM and you don't have enough free disk space available, you will have problems.

The report of VM size in Activity monitor is not the size of your swap files. Mine lists 13GB, but I only have 128MB of swap files. The stuff listing virtual memory in the Activity Monitor is virtually irrelevant. Pageouts are what you need to watch. Every page out is 4kB being written to a swap file. Do the math and you'll see how much disk activity is going on due to VM.

Lava Lamp Freak · 03:22 AM

I don't understand this VM stuff. I had several applications running including Photoshop. Long after quitting I still had a lot of page outs, even though I had NO programs running, and the system was so slow it was virtually unusable. So, I rebooted and that fixed it. Is it normal to have to reboot your computer daily to re-set the swap?

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bowwowman · Mar 28, 2006, 11:01 AM

PS is NOT very good at releasing it's memory allocation, both real & Virtual. Having lots of pageouts (200K + IS alot) means that you need more real ram, plain & simple.......