On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Barbara Hodge wrote: > I have in System memory: > > Free 9 MB (scarily low???)
No, quite normal actually. As I mentioned earlier, OS X is a virtual memory operating system. I don't want to go into a highly technical discussion of what a virtual memory system is except to say that it is normal to have very little free memory. The important question to whether you have enough physical memory is how much page faulting is going on and that's partually answered by: > Page ins/outs 68262/13569 But without knowing how long the system has been up, those numbers are meaningless. Comparing to my system, if you've been up for a few days, I'd call those numbers low. I hit over one million "page ins" in five days last week while temporarily running my G4 iMac with only 786 MB (awaiting warranty replacement of a 1GB memory card). However, during that period, I'd call performance unsatisfactory. > I have 7 apps open: Quark, e'rage, safari, dreamweaver, adobe photoshop, > adobe acrobat, excel. Having them open is not necessarily going to cause you memory performance issues if six of them are idle. However, many programs are doing stuff in the background (animatations in web pages, Entourage checking for new mail, etc.). Memory performance issues develop when the active processes collectively need more memory than is available and the operating system has to keep switching that memory around between those processes. The memory used by inactive processes gets "swapped out" to disk where it's no longer competing for the physical memory. The reason I said above that low free memory is normal is because the operating system does not free up more memory by swapping than is actually needed. Only by quitting a program does large chunks of memory get freed. -- Larry Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
