page out in activity monitor

[mrdinh]

when i close some apps on my mac pro...i still see page outs..why? should mac os x auto refresh to 0 ? thanks

 

[theSeb]

when i close some apps on my mac pro...i still see page outs..why? should mac os x auto refresh to 0 ? thanks

The page outs are accumulative since your last restart.

 

[mrdinh]

when does it start over? reboot?

 

[GGJstudios]

when does it start over? reboot?

Yes, when you restart your Mac, it resets page outs and swap used to zero. To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[mrdinh]

thanks ...great info ....more ram doesn't mean a quicker computer?

 

[paulrbeers]

thanks ...great info ....more ram doesn't mean a quicker computer?

If your page outs (which means your computer is utilizing the hard drive as "memory") are insignificant than more RAM would not affect the speed of your computer. However, if your page outs are significant than more RAM will increase your computer's overall speed since the hard drive is considerably slower than RAM (even SSD's are considerably slower).