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kamina · Sep 25, 2006, 07:50 AM

I'm wondering what's going on, as my notebook is allways out of memory. I have a macbook pro with 2GB of ram, and when I first boot up I have about 1.7GB free. After using the notebook for a while, and closing all my applications I only have about 400MB free. I've been trying to figure out what is using up all the memory, and looking in Activity Monitor for clues, but nothing is really jumping out. My only guess is that it's Kernel_task?

Any way to start searching for the cause? When it runs out of memory according to Activity Monitor it definatly feels like it's out of memory (everything lags).

chabig · Sep 25, 2006, 10:35 AM

I don't really know what you mean by "lags", but your computer is most likely acting normally. You purchased 2GB or RAM and the OS is making full use of it. That's the way modern memory management works. You have to get out of the past, where free memory was considered good. Nowadays, you don't want free memory. Free memory is wasted memory.

So please tell us what programs you are running and what the symptoms of "lag" are. We'll try to get to the bottom of it.

Chris

kamina · Sep 25, 2006, 02:48 PM

By lag I mean what seems to be swapping. For example switching from one tab to another in the browser, useing expose to find an applications window, using command+tab to change to another application... Anything has the kind of delay that you would expect when your computer is swapping (which does not happen when activity monitor shows free memory).

chabig · Sep 25, 2006, 03:05 PM

Kamina,

What you think of as free memory is the sum of Free and Inactive. I'm running 10 applications right now on my Powerbook and I have 513 MB inactive and 128 MB free, out of a total of 1.25GB. My virtual memory size is about 8 GB. How much do you show for Free, Inactive, and VM?

Also, tell us what two numbers you see at the bottom for Page ins/outs. My numbers are 56757/2405, which is pretty typical.

I highly doubt that you have a low memory problem. You yourself that you had 400 MB free. The computer won't be swapping if that is the case. You can sort the processes in Activity Monitor by CPU usage. That will probably give you a clue what is going on, but the fact that nothing there jumps out at you also indicates normal operation.

Chris

kamina · Sep 25, 2006, 04:31 PM

Sorry, I think I was unclear

I started to wonder about the swapping, and closed all my open applications. After everything was shut, I looked in Activity monitor and it showed me I had 400MB of ram free. I was astonished, and rebooted the computer to see how much memory would be free after that. It showed me about 1.7GB free which seemed pretty close to what I would have expected.

I opened up firefox, mail, thunderbird and a few ssh-sesssions, and after about an hour things started to clutter up again. By clutter up I mean that changing from one application to another is not very snappy...

Ofcourse with this little applications running this is not a serious problem, but as soon as I run parallels (even with only 1 windows xp that has 512MB of ram allocated) anything else becomes extremly slow. There is no way to switch between parallels and another application in a smooth way, rather it allways requires waiting.

Before upgrading to 2GB (from 1.5GB) parallels was almost unusable. Ofcourse it would run, but if I tried to open up my email or browser under osx I would have to wait for about a minute. Now it's more like 5-10 seconds, but even that seems like alot (as I can clearly feel it's due to swapping). I'll have a look at the Page ins / outs when I get to the office tomorrow. I'm writing this from my iMac C2D at home and it does'nt feel laggy at all (even though it only has 1GB ram)

chabig · Sep 25, 2006, 11:46 PM

Originally Posted by kamina

I started to wonder about the swapping, and closed all my open applications. After everything was shut, I looked in Activity monitor and it showed me I had 400MB of ram free. I was astonished, and rebooted the computer to see how much memory would be free after that. It showed me about 1.7GB free which seemed pretty close to what I would have expected.

I don't think 400MB of free RAM sounds at all unusual.

For the rest of it, I don't have an Intel Mac so I have no experience with Parallels. I'm sure it requires a lot of resources, though, and I'm not surprised that you suffer a performance hit when you load and run a second OS on your machine.

Chris

kamina · 06:31 AM

Here's a typical situation again. Everything seemed to work pretty well for a few day's, maby because I rebooted daily... Now the machine has been on for a few day's, and even though I don't have "alot" of programs running, things are really slow again. Here is a screenshot of Activity Monitor:

Please stick to the Image Posting Guidelines -- OreoCookie

chabig · Oct 5, 2006, 04:03 PM

Everything in that window looks completely normal to me. Notice how you are only using about 13% of your machine's CPU capacity?

Chris

chabig · Oct 5, 2006, 05:15 PM

Here is more information. Your problem may be related to Parallels. Pop on over to the MacOSXHints forums and read this one:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...60622090404212

Chris

kamina · Oct 6, 2006, 03:46 AM

Thanks, this could very well be the problem. I think I might have allways had Parallels open at some point before the problem starts.

chefpastry · Oct 6, 2006, 06:49 AM

I believe that the advantages of PD Tweaker were added to Parallels itself in the newer versions. Therefore, installing it would offer no advantage.

kamina, have you tried changing the Memory setting in Parallel's Preferences? I began playing with it a little after seeing this thread and managed to clear up some memory on my computer.

kamina · Oct 6, 2006, 06:55 AM

Wow...

I thought I had reduced the amount of memory when I installed it, but I guess not. I had over 1.6GB of ram "allocated" for virtuals. I guess I might have changed the setting during the beta, and forgotten to change it after purchasing and reinstalling. Hope it will help.