Thanks Ronni. > Have you checked your RAM usage in Activity Monitor?
There's always been adequate RAM for my use, other than the odd occasion when more would be nice, which no doubt most people run into now and again. I don't think I've ever bought a Mac without immediately doubling the RAM, because unless you're the lightest of users, I think the default RAM installations are inadequate (probably by design). But those peaking RAM situations are usually temporary matters, solved by quitting another RAM hungry application or two. My problem is this kind of gradual deterioration of performance and hard disk capacity over a couple of days, which remains unresolved by quitting processes. The only solution I've found so far is a restart, which apart from it not having always been that way and shouldn't be, is a pain. > Use Activity Monitor to watch your RAM usage. If Free memory falls to the > point where Inactive memory is being released, you may want to consider > adding more RAM to maintain maximum performance. I'll keep my eye on that out of interest. Free RAM currently at 740MB, inactive at 565MB. I'm reluctant to throw more RAM at it if the underlying problem isn't solved. > You can also look at the 'Page outs' value, at the bottom of Activity > Monitor's main window. This number indicates how many times your Mac has run > out of available memory and used your hard drive as virtual RAM. This number > should be as low as possible. I see that "Page outs" is defined as "number of virtual memory page ins/outs", but the figure provided is, right now, 1.9MB. Isn't 1.9MB a volume figure, as opposed to a "number of times" figure? I don't get it what 1.9MB actually means in terms of "number of times". Cheers, Steven On 12/05/2012, at 9:11 AM, Ronda Brown wrote: > Hi Steven, > > Have you checked your RAM usage in Activity Monitor? > Use Activity Monitor to watch your RAM usage. If Free memory falls to the > point where Inactive memory is being released, you may want to consider > adding more RAM to maintain maximum performance. > > You can also look at the 'Page outs' value, at the bottom of Activity > Monitor's main window. This number indicates how many times your Mac has run > out of available memory and used your hard drive as virtual RAM. This number > should be as low as possible. > > Cheers, > Ronni > Sent from Ronni's iPad > > On 12/05/2012, at 3:38 AM, Steven Knowles <emai...@knowles.net.au> wrote: > >> I'm running 10.7.3 on a 17" MBP which is probably getting a bit aged these >> days, 2.4 GHz Intel Core Due, 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. >> >> At startup, I have around 50GB of spare hard disk capacity, of a total 250GB >> disk. >> >> Over the past month o so, what happens is that over around a 2 to 4 day >> period, the machine gets slower and slower, to the point that it's >> unbearably slow, so a restart becomes necessary. >> >> In line with the progression of slowness, seems to be disappearance of hard >> disk capacity. By the time I have to restart, a quick check of hard disk >> capacity, and it's down to around 1 or 2GB. >> >> Trash is emptied regularly (I almost always use Secure Empty Trash). >> >> Any clues as to what might be causing this? >> >> I've just noticed 10.7.4 is out, so I'll update to that to see if that makes >> a difference, but any hints in the meantime would be appreciated. >> >> Cheers, Steven -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>
