Keeping as few apps open as necessary and regularly restarting apps that hog memory is definitely advisable. Most Mac’s these days come with around 4 GB of main memory, which is more than adequate, but if you’re a power user or frequently run dozens of apps or do some heavy work in Aperture, iMovie or Final Cut Pro, 8 GB is a decent step up for a MacBook Pro. The simplest way by far is to increase the amount of RAM installed in your Mac. So how can you maximise your Mac’s performance in terms of memory, avoiding the use of virtual memory unless absolutely essential? Virtual memory can be essential when you run out of physical memoryįor more details on Activity Monitor, check out our related masterclass tutorial.
If I hadn’t upgraded to 8 GB of RAM however, it’s pretty obvious that my memory would already be full and the virtual memory would be in use, along with lots of page outs – there would probably be a noticeable slowdown in performance. Notice in the screenshot below that no page outs have occurred, the reason being that my memory capacity is sufficient to run all the apps I have open without needing to use any virtual memory. Unfortunately, many applications such as Safari and iTunes seem to gobble up memory which only increases over time, so it’s always wise to check with Activity Monitor from time to time and decide whether to close a few apps or even restart your Mac.
This means that even if I use all 8 GB of memory, there is more space available based on the free space on my hard disk (my disk is 256 GB).
In my case, you’ll see that I have 8 GB of memory installed (thanks to a recent upgrade from 4GB), and 181.37 GB of space allocated to virtual memory. Inspect how much virtual memory is being used using Activity MonitorĪt the bottom of the main window, there are some details about the available memory, as well as the virtual memory size, the number of page ins and page outs. Click on the Real Mem column to sort the list based on the amount of memory being used.
When it opens, go to the System Memory section to view more details about the memory usage. To see what your Mac is up to beneath the hood, open up Activity Monitor – this is an incredibly useful native app that lives in the Applications -> Utilities folder. The important term here is page ins, because it gives in an indication of how much virtual memory is being used.
There’s an easy way to find out how much memory your Mac is using and to check the virtual memory usage, as well as other information such as the number of “page outs” and “page ins”. Have you ever seen the spinning beach ball in Safari? That often happens when you’ve run out of memory and virtual memory is being used. If all the memory is used up, my computer will start to use virtual memory and the whole machine will see a marked decrease in performance.
All those apps need a certain amount of memory allocated to run effectively – in my case, they’re using 4.43 GB of my Mac’s RAM, and the more apps that are open, the more memory will be used. As I’m writing this article, I already have 7 apps open (Safari, iTunes, Messages, Skype, Activity Monitor, Mail, and Finder) and many processes. Virtual memory can be critical to your Mac, simply because there often isn’t enough physical memory to run all the apps that you have open. Unfortunately, virtual memory is much slower than the physical RAM installed in your computer, because hard disks cannot match the speed of memory chips.
If Mac OS X needs to use all 4 GB of main memory, it can still make use of any free space on your hard disk as an extension to that memory. Let’s say that you have 4 GB of main memory on your Mac and a 512 GB hard disk. This is where virtual memory comes in – you can think of it as a kind of extension to the real memory on your system, albeit much slower because it is in fact physical space on your hard disk (or SSD, if you have one installed). Nevertheless, every computer has a finite amount of memory so Mac OS X might actually need to use more than is physically available on your system. Memory must be as fast as possible (and it helps to have as much as possible) to maximise your Mac’s performance thankfully, prices have drastically fallen in recent years. Memory is critical to any computer to run applications and carry out all the operations commanded by the user. Your Mac comes with a limited amount of physical memory (RAM) installed by default.