I find myself sharing this tip every week. When your Mac has been used for several days/weeks, the consistent opening and closing of applications chip away at your available memory (RAM). Soon you will be out of what is referred to as “contiguous memory”, and the machine will start using the much slower virtual memory which writes info to the hard drive instead of the super-fast RAM chip.
To check if you are out of contiguous memory, open Applications: Utilities: Activity Monitor. Select the “System Memory” tab, and look at the number of “Page Outs”. If this number is greater than zero, you are out of memory. It’s time to restart!
May 6th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
For anyone who stumbles across this article, it’s wrong telling you to restart. That doesn’t truly solve the problem.
It should be noted, pageouts mean you’ve used up physical memory and are writing things to the hard drive as virtual memory, which is slow compared to physical memory, especially if your drive is almost full. Restarting ‘fixes’ this by closing all your apps that are eating memory, but if you restart and proceed to re-open everything you previously had open, you’re back in the same boat. Equally, logging out and back in would achieve the same thing.
Without restarting or logging out, you can speed things up by closing application that cause pageouts. Browsers (as the browser cache grows), virtual machines, databases and professional tools (ex: Adobe) tend to consume the most memory on a computer, although opening lots of smaller things will do it too. Close down some things and you’ll see better performance (or install enough RAM to keep everything open at once without pageouts).
Restarting browsers or limiting the number of open browser tabs will often temporarily alleviate the underlying problem of RAM limitation issues. Additionally, if you have multiple users logged into the same machine, duplicate programs may be running in memory (two browsers, two Photoshops, etc). If you’re in a multiple user environment, consider having the previous user log out, not fast-user switch.
July 16th, 2009 at 11:11 am
hi My outs is in the hundreds of kilobytes is that bad ?
July 20th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Anything over zero means you are out of contiguous RAM. How much RAM do you have on the Mac?
December 7th, 2009 at 4:15 am
my outs are 1.2 gig, what should i do??? please email me if you have any advice also what is restart??
December 7th, 2009 at 9:46 am
You need to restart your Mac. Go to the Apple icon at the top left hand corner of your screen, click it, and choose Restart.