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.
#Increase the disk space for mac os mac os x
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.
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