Dumping inactive memory.

QuadLeo

Sometimes during the day my 2GB RAM fills up to around 90% - 100%. Usually when a few apps are open and a few processes are running. I was having a look at activity monitor and I noticed that 1.40GB was inactive. Is there a way of freeing up this memory and dumping the inactive stuff? I'm trying to stop my machine from doing page outs all the time. I googled it but I've found various results. Some people saying it's easy and straight forward, others said it's risky and could temporarily corrupt apps that are running. Has anybody here done this and if so what are the risks. Is it worth it?

I thought that applications were meant to release the memory it was using once it was finished. Is it an application problem? It happens with various apps all the time so I can't really narrow it down.

Thanks.

Sad Professor

I'd leave it alone. Inactive ram is actually a good thing. OSX's memory management will reassign it to new processes as is needed. The reason it's kept inactive and not flushed is in case you decide to return to that same process later. It makes things faster.

You've probably read somewhere that pageouts are bad but they're a perfectly normal part of how OS X's virtual memory system works. They only indicate a problem or lack of RAM if you're getting tons of them over a short period of time. It's not unusual to see a lot of them after your mac's been left running for several days or if you've been opening a lot of different apps.

OSX's memory management is smart and tries to make full use of all the memory at it's disposal.

QuadLeo

Thanks. I was told that page outs were bad and were slowing my system down. It was explained to me that if my RAM is nearly full and I start an application that needs a lot of RAM, the page outs that occur will slow this application because it's memory is stored virtually on the HD and it takes longer to read/write. It makes sense that the os leaves some memory inactive to speed up regular processes. I'll leave it alone so.

Sad Professor

QuadLeo wrote: »

I was told that page outs were bad and were slowing my system down. It was explained to me that if my RAM is nearly full and I start an application that needs a lot of RAM, the page outs that occur will slow this application because it's memory is stored virtually on the HD and it takes longer to read/write.

Which is kinda true it's just a bit more complicated.

Have you experienced any major slow-downs on your mac? Spinning beach-ball, etc? What's you're uptime like, do you shut-down every day or just sleep? How many pageouts are you getting?

QuadLeo

I usually power down completely every night. But by the end of the day I could have anywhere between 30 and 100 page outs. I don't really notice my machine slowing down tbh. I only run essential apps when I'm doing something intensive.

Sad Professor

I have 3GB of RAM and according to iStat pro I've had 706,774 page outs. rofl. Mind you my uptime is 10 days and 3 hours. And I run a lot of apps at once, including some pretty intensive ones.

So 30 to 100 a day is good.

Type 17

As mentioned, 30-100 is fine - my iMac has been up for nearly 12 days and has almost 250,000 pageouts. I'm using lots of apps at once, including Aperture and Photoshop Elements.

However, its RAM Is already fully configured (4GB), so more RAM won't fix that. Anyway, it performs fine, and much better than when I only had 2GB installed.

QuadLeo

That's grand. I was just getting a bit paranoid. I'll probably upgrade my RAM soon anyway.

pvik00

As the others have told, the VM subsystem does it's job, so you probably might not want to bother.

If you still insist for some reason you can do it:
http://www.activata.co.uk/ifreemem/