Page ins & outs How to improve?

Question

My mini has been running slower lately and I searched the questions already asked on this subject. I looked and my page ins and outs are 5732967/6329032. From what I have read these are not great numbers. My page outs should be 10 to 15% of my page ins or about 573296 to 85994.
What can I do to improve these numbers? Since I do not have hardly any software including any security software installed on my computer it is a complete mystery why I am using up the available memory so quickly.
Thanks,
Sue

Answer 1

Suzey, thanks for that info.
Your Intel Mini has the minimum amount of RAM memory that these Minis shipped with. It can be increased up to 4 times that amount of RAM (2 Gigabytes). Unfortunately the installation process can be somewhat expensive -- and it is not easy to do yourself, IMHO.
When you are running too many programs for the amount of RAM your computer has, the Virtual memory system has to work a lot harder to make up for this. This system uses the hard drive in place of RAM. Hard drives are about 100 times slower than real RAM, so it is not surprising that your Mini has slowed down.
Since you say the problem is recent, we might look at what new programs you are running that could be demanding too much memory.
First place to look is dashboard widgets. I'd suggest not running any of them. They can be real memory hogs, and some of them have outright memory leaks.
Another area would be legacy PPC applications, which run in the Rosetta emulation layer. If there is any program running that requires PPC emulation, Rosetta will load and this will use a lot of extra memory. Common programs that would require Rosetta to run on your Intel Mini would be MSOffice 2004, older versions of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and print drivers for older printers.
To see if you have any legacy apps running, fire up Utilities > Activity Monitor and make sure the pop-up menu at the top of the window says "All Processes" -- and not just "My Processes". Look in the column labeled "Kind" and scroll through the list. Ideally, everything will say Intel. If any process says "PPC", then we should see if that program or driver can be upgraded to an Intel version.
Another way to lessen the use of the virtual memory system, is not to run too many programs at the same time. And be sure you actually quit a program when not using it -- instead of just closing its window or minimizing it.
If you have upgraded from Safari 3 to Safari 4, that could also have impacted your system. Safari 4 can be a great resource user. I would recommend using Firefox instead of Safari 4 -- if your Mini is RAM-limited.
One additional note: the virtual memory system requires adequate free space on your hard drive to work efficiently. If your hard drive is running out of room, that could also be part of your problem. Click once on your hard drive icon in the Finder, then File > Get Info. Please report back with what Get Info says for "Available" space.
And yet another thought ... sometimes you can muddle through this sort of situation by restarting your Mini more often; perhaps two or three times a day.