[air]

Hi everybody. I have a MacBook 2.2 Ghz Intel C2Duo with 2 GB memory, and it has become almost impossible to use. I get the spinning wheel almost every 3 minutes, and Safari 3.1 has been crashing left and right. I checked out Activity Monitor and got these results. Is it odd to have 57 GB of VM running? I haven't seen this before. I mean, Adium was using 1.0 GB of VM. Isn't that a bit too much for such a lightweight app?

here is a screenshot.



I would appreciate any help!

[mduell]

I don't see anything unusual there. ~1GB per app and ~50GB total is pretty typical for VM; remember it's just address space, not actual memory.

Can we have a complete screenshot of Activity Monitor and/or the output of top?

[P]

Nope, your RAM usage looks fine. Try to figure out what is using your CPU when it's slowing down like that.

[air]

I think this is a bit too much usage...no? only 115.7 mb free? I had a mac mini with similar specs to this macbook, and almost never had this little free memory left over...

[P]

Memory is divided into four pieces: Wired, Active, Inactive and Free. Wired is stuff that can never be swapped out to disk (such as the routine for swapping memory back in again). Active is stuff that is currently in use. Inactive is memory that can be swapped out to disk at any time, and Free is really free - you can swap in to it without swapping out what was in that area to begin with. The reason for not swapping the Inactive stuff out is that you might need it again - for instance, if you relaunch an app that you just closed - in which case you save some time. Inactive also includes the disk cache.

Having a small amount of memory free is not a bad thing. In a perfect world, the free memory would be zero, because free memory is wasted memory. In practice you can't keep it at zero, because you need to have some spare for an emergency swap in at a page fault. What is bad is when Inactive + Free is a small number - that means that you have little breathing room in the shape of things you can swap out, and you might use some more real RAM to keep the speed of the machine decent. The Win NT memory model is a little different, but in essence what you see as "Free" memory in Windows is Inactive + Free (technically I think it's dynamic disk cache + free).

Another thing to keep an eye on is the number of pageouts - that is memory that the OS has felt forced to swap to disk while it still might be useful in the future (pageins is irrelevant, since it also includes all the program code when you launch a program). In your case, you're in decent shape. You still have almost 700 megs to breathe in, and you've only used 387 megs of swap.

[Catfish_Man]

Heh, your Adium is running pretty light, actually. Mine is usually a lot bigger than that (but then, I usually have a *lot* of stuff open).

[CharlesS]

Find one of the crash logs for Safari, which you can find in your home folder under Library/Logs/CrashReporter, and post it here. It might have some clues as to what's going on.