Re: Why doesn't Activity Monitor's memory panel make any sense?

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:14:41 +0000, Simon Slavin
<slavins.delete.these.four.words@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 28/11/2008, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote in message
<7phvi4td7qkudlh1ndgr9dkjmb618m5061@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Quite apart from the whole "WTF is Wired vs Active" dichotomy (which
has been explained before, but I've forgotten), how is it that I can
have 846meg swap used when it has only paged out 490meg?

Swap space reflects /all/ memory needed, not just the amount swapped out.

There was in the region of a gig wired, a gig active and another gig
inactive when I posted, so that doesn't seem like the whole answer.
Particularly since there's a "VM size" which probably *is* going to be
all memory allocated.

I've got 4gig physical RAM. Right now (same bootup) I'm at

Free: 336meg
Wired: 1.09gig
Active: 1.80gig
Inactive: 795meg
Used: 3.67gig

VM size: 14.61gig
Page ins: 2.81gig
Page outs: 1.21gig
Swap used: 1.58gig

The VM size appears to correlate nicely with the total of the "virtual
memory" column in Activity Monitor/Processes, which is kindly
copy+pasteable into a spread***.

But there's still a nearly 400meg gap between pages sent out and how
much is in swap.

So what else is going into swap? Swapping out cached file data would
be kind of loopy, although I do have two non-boot partitions and a
mounted AFP network share that I could imagine OSX might want to cache
bits of locally - wild guess there. I am not using a ramdisk or any
other memory-eating oddity that I know of.

But there are several other tricky things about how all those types of
memory fit together. Unless you're familiar with all the terms don't
expect them to all add up neatly like a sum.

I'd welcome any information that lets me become familiar. That's
rather why I asked...

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"It's only work when somebody makes you do it." - Calvin
.

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