I'm a little rusty but here goes.
Virtual memory used it not necessarily memory used.
A program can allocate as much virtual memory as it wants so long as
it doesn't overload the virtual memory address space available. RAM
is only used when a page in the virtual memory is paged-in. Swap is
used when a page in the VM is swapped-out. If a page is sitting there
unmapped it basically is just there waiting for a program to page
something into it.
Note. There are two different concepts at work: paging and swapping.
Paging loads and purges data into and out of the program's address
space respectively. Swapping is for swapping a page from RAM to a
backing store (swap, etc) and vice-versa.
This page might be able to shed a bit more light: http://
www.memorymanagement.org/glossary/v.html#virtual.memory-1
Mal
On 08/08/2005, at 9:31 PM, Denise & Bill wrote:
My iMac G5 20" ran out of memory tonight - wouldn't even copy a
single word
in Word.
Surprising considering it has 512 Mb RAM and a 250 Gig HD. Activity
monitor
showed over 5 Gigs allocated to virtual memory. I was shocked.
The "Real
Memory" allocated was about 140Mb. I suspected the problem might
be related
to putting the machine to sleep, rather than shutting it down each
night,
over a period of several weeks.
Sure enough, a re-boot solved the issues, though VM remains just
under 4
Gigs. Has anyone heard of this issue? Is it a problem? I certainly
noticed
a significant slowing in speed over the last week or three. The re-
boot has
helped, but it seems there is a lot of "stuff" happening in the
background,
stealing performance.
It seems that even with only about 13 items running in "My
Processes" there
is a vast array of other items running - say 40 to 50 under "All
Processes"
One "kernel task" has 46 Mb of real memory and a huge 708 Mb of VM.
Should I shut down instead of sleep my iMac? Is there a means of
rationing
virtual memory (I have 233 Gb free space). Any performance
boosting tips?
Thanks
Bill
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