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rgarza · Sep 1, 2015, 11:57 AM

Does this happpen to anyone else?

I'm wondering if this is the cause of why sometimes I feel some sluggishness and spinning beachballs for simple tasks on my Mac mini. I've had it less than a year, latest update, but that always stays the same. After a reboot, everything is at zero, but after a while it will go back to that. verified disk and repaired permissions. Other than doing a clean install, any other suggestions?

Mike Wuerthele · Sep 1, 2015, 01:59 PM

Holy smoke. That's a lot of compressed memory. I'll think on it, but there's clearly something wrong.

jridder · Sep 1, 2015, 08:46 PM

Its actually pretty normal for a 4GB machine. My Macbook Air sits around that number most of the time. Be thankful, if it wasn't compressed you would be swapping all the time.

Disregard, I was looking at the bottom number not the top. What version of OS X are you running.

rgarza · Sep 1, 2015, 11:33 PM

10.10.5. Can't remember if it would do that when I first got it. The sluggishness and spinning beach balls have always been there though.

P · Sep 2, 2015, 03:42 AM

That looks like an overflow/conversion error of a 64-bit int, that it is actually reporting -1 in a signed int but the app is reading it like an unsigned int. Doubt that it is anything to worry about.

BLAZE_MkIV · Sep 2, 2015, 10:42 AM

Run top or ps in terminal and compare.

rgarza · Sep 2, 2015, 12:47 PM

here's the output. Why is my vm 600G?

P · Sep 2, 2015, 03:29 PM

"vsize" is not important. Mine is 502G right now. That is not your problem - your problem is that you have 23697 swapouts. You are running out of memory frequently, and that is likely what your sluggishness and beach balls are coming from.

First: you don't mention your exact model, but check if you can upgrade your RAM. It's cheap enough, and will be a nice boost in any case. If that doesn't help enough, we'll have to start analyzing what is using so much memory.

rgarza · Sep 2, 2015, 07:17 PM

This is a non-upgradable macmini

P · Sep 3, 2015, 09:17 AM

What model do you have, then? The 1.4 GHz late 2014 model?

rgarza · Sep 3, 2015, 09:53 AM

Yes late 2014 model i5. I rebooted , everything was on zero. Put the mini to sleep and then wake. Now the large number is back, while everything else is at zero.

P · Sep 6, 2015, 11:42 AM

Don't bother about the large number, that is not the reason your Mac is slow. Look at the "top" screen you posted. There you can see that "CMPRS", compressed memory, is -32K. This is misread by the Activity monitor application as a very big number, because of the way negative numbers are represented in memory (see this if you're interested in details). The reason that your Mac is something slow is because you're running out of memory on occasion.

rgarza · Sep 8, 2015, 03:19 AM

without any apps running, its using around 2 gigs, is that the norm now for OS X ? all this background stuff seems to be using it up

P · Sep 8, 2015, 07:53 AM

If it has been up for a while, but you've closed all the apps again, normal is that it uses about 3.9 GB of 4 GB. That doesn't mean that it is out of memory - standard procedure is to not remove things from memory until that memory is needed for other things. That memory is marked as "inactive", and is technically in use, but that is not a problem - it can be reused for something else quickly. But yes, while 2GB is a lot, it doesn't seem unreasonable. 4GB is borderline for a modern Mac - OS X is very good at using memory efficiently, but it has never been frugal with it. For instance, if you're running both 32-bit and 64-bit apps, you need to load those libraries into memory twice - that adds up.