Mini DUO slowwwwing down almost daily !!!!! Anyone else experiencing this??

Question

My mini seems to almost get slower by the day especially after it is left to go to sleep for a few hours it is extremely slow starting up again.Settitng it so nothing goes to sleep does not seem to make much difference. I have the stock 512mb of ram and the Core Duo 1.6ghz model with almost no added software at all. So far I have added:
mac the ripper
Limewire
Garagesale
Stuffit
Opera
When I have none of these running it is still very slow and if 2 of them are running at once ie -Safari and Garagesale the response time for opening and closing windows can be up to a minute at times. Any ideas of where I should be looking???

Answer 1

With a nearly 40% page out ratio you a short of RAM which is causing performance issues with your mini. I normally recommend the possibility of RAM upgrades if this ratio gets to 10%. Personally I think with the current requirements of Rosetta with the Intel Macs 1GB is a recommended minimum amount of RAM. For a PowerPCs Mac I always given this as 768MB.
After having restarted (and after launching Safari and getting to this thread) my memory status looks like this…
Wired - 157.27MB
Active - 93.73MB
Inactive - 138.27MB
Used - 388.79MB
Page ins/outs - 14397/0
You might want to look at your memory status after a restart.
With regards to Safari, it's not actually consuming that 200+MB RAM. Well, it is and it isn't. If you take my Safari usage at the moment of 31.11MB (Real Memory/383.38MB (Virtual Memory) it really means that Safari is consuming 31.11MB of my physical (2GB) RAM whereas the 383.38MB is Safari's piece of your swap file (which is shown in total by VM size).
Safari won't actually use that virtual memory unless it has to and this use will be reflected in your page outs. Under optimal conditions it will grab physical RAM when it can and to be honest, 50MB should be more than enough physical RAM for Safari to operate which should be well within your current memory limits. The same goes for Mail.
So if you stick to using Safari and Mail in any particular day you should see few, if any, page outs. Even with your 512MB. I have an iBook with 256MB RAM and it runs fine as I only use it for e-mail and web browsing.
One thing that is a big memory hog is Rosetta. It can consume 200MB+ of physical RAM which can easily throw you into to page out land causing your slow down. Any PowerPC application, no matter how small, will activate Rosetta.
What you need to be really careful is how you quantify your mini's "slowness". Is it a case of it progressively getting slower when you are running a certain set of applications or does it fluctuate in speed depending on the applications you have open?
Personally, I think your problem is simply a lack of RAM in the first place.