How many GBs should the VM be?

[musicpyrite]

My father asked my to come over and look at his computer (CTR iMac, 192 RAM, 10 GB HD, 10.3.3) to see why it was running so slow. So I opened up terminal, and typed top, and saw the virtual memory was 2.57 GB and heres what the top command says:

Processes: 54 total, 2 running, 52 sleeping... 136 threads 17:24:47
Load Avg: 1.72, 1.67, 1.18 CPU usage: 30.4% user, 20.7% sys, 48.9% idle
SharedLibs: num = 120, resident = 20.6M code, 1.60M data, 6.88M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 4483, resident = 59.9M + 6.91M private, 51.5M shared
PhysMem: 31.6M wired, 105M active, 52.6M inactive, 189M used, 2.66M free
VM: 2.57G + 82.9M 111309(0) pageins, 54669(53) pageout

So then I cheked how much free disk space he has: 2.36 GB. Is he runnig so slow because his VM size is so big? If so would more ram speed up his computer?

 

[Counterfit]

More RAM. My parents' iMac has the same amount, and it's pretty darn slow. The 333MHz G3 doesn't help much, but it could be much faster

 

[stoid]

Mac OS X loves RAM. I would get him up to at least 384, maybe 512 if he plans to keep it awhile.


Here's my current stats on a 15 inch 1.25 GHz PowerBook with 512MB of RAM:

Processes: 59 total, 3 running, 56 sleeping... 174 threads 17:06:44
Load Avg: 1.30, 1.27, 1.21 CPU usage: 82.2% user, 17.8% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 116, resident = 23.8M code, 2.44M data, 4.66M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 10995, resident = 176M + 8.00M private, 85.4M shared
PhysMem: 67.9M wired, 233M active, 154M inactive, 456M used, 56.0M free
VM: 4.59G + 80.9M 540642(0) pageins, 366184(0) pageouts


edit: BTW, I'm running folding. As you can see, I've got 4.6GB of VM going, and about 19 GB free on my HD. As long as the computer is responding quickly, then I wouldn't worry too much about VM size.

 

[cb911]

i don't know if you could ever have enough RAM... i've got 1.5GB RAM in my 1.25GHz PB and my Panther partition is always filling up... although i've only got just over 2GB free. but i'm going to fix that soon.

 

[musicpyrite]

Thanks for the replies guys, I'll try to coax him into getting more. The last time he upgraded his RAM, he went form 2 64 MB sticks, to 1 64 MB and 1 128 MB sticks. I was also wondering because my VM, at times when I'm using Photoshop and stuff like that can be up to 5 GB.

Processes: 68 total, 3 running, 65 sleeping... 202 threads 20:10:21
Load Avg: 1.50, 1.37, 1.20 CPU usage: 81.4% user, 18.6% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 121, resident = 21.3M code, 2.29M data, 4.83M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 9270, resident = 89.8M + 7.61M private, 48.2M shared
PhysMem: 52.6M wired, 125M active, 71.7M inactive, 249M used, 6.41M free
VM: 4.03G + 83.2M 1359402(0) pageins, 1099287(0) pageouts