Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
- Subject: Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
- From: Thomas Backman <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 21:36:54 +0200
Nobody?
This is very annoying... I rebooted 40 minutes ago. Since then I
started a VM with 640MB RAM (in VirtualBox, rather than VMware),
iTunes, Firefox etc. Current RAM stats:
Free: 25MB
Inactive: 1.12GB
Wired: 891MB
Active: 1007MB
Page outs: 25MB (it stopped paging when I quit Firefox)
Why is it swapping with 37% of my total RAM inactive?! I just don't
get it. Stuff starts beachballing at random, etc.
I'm starting to seriously consider switching to another OS because of
this. I can't use virtual machines anymore, and that's not the only
problem, either... Needless to say it happens without them, too,
sooner or later... :(
I realize this isn't really the "OS X support" list, just figured
people here might know what's going on.
/Thomas
On May 11, 2008, at 6:51 PM, Thomas Backman wrote:
I've got a Macbook Pro C2D, with 3GB RAM, running OS X 10.5.2. Long
story short, I've got about 800MB of inactive memory, and still it's
swapping like crazy, throwing 20 second freezes into my typing, etc.
Unusable. But why is it swapping, when there is so much memory
available? I just don't get it. Isn't inactive memory by definition
easy to free? If so, why isn't it taking advantage of it, instead of
acting as if I'm actually *using* the whole 3 gigs?
I recently upgraded from 2GB to 3GB to be able to use VMware Fusion
better. Well, I can't. Despite adding 1024MB of memory, I couldn't
even increase the VM from 512 to 768MB. Where did the rest of my new
gigabyte go? I can't say it feels any faster at all.
As of right now, I've got about 1.65GB active memory, 520MB wired,
and over 800MB inactive. Despite all that inactive memory, I've got
over 500MB of page outs!
I don't pretend to understand paging very much at all, except I do
know that excessive paging (as in 500MB in 10 minutes) feels
EXTREMELY slow.
Is this by design, and if so, why...? If not, well, why does it
happen? :)
Regards,
Thomas
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