02-23-2011, 11:34 AM

The problem I'm about to describe had happened to me about a year ago, but I can't remember what I did to fix it. I may have been a command-line fix.

My machine is the aluminum MacBook (non-Pro), 2.0. Yesterday I upgraded my HDD to a 500GB. Through Carbon Copy Cloner, I cloned my old hard drive. Once complete, I immediately updated Time Machine and made sure that all worked. All was good. Then, I did another restart. After opening Photoshop and a few other memory hogs, I noticed that the memory that was being used was WIRED. Usually the OS uses the wired memory and only takes up about 400MB. Applications should use mostly ACTIVE memory, since the active can be moved around and written to the HDD if necessary. So... before my upgrade, (with numerous applications open and running), wired memory was about 15% of my memory monitor. Active memory would be about 60% of my memory. Now, it is backwards.

Like I said, I ran into this about a year ago. I can't remember if it was when I had previously done a different HDD upgrade or it was 10.6 install or what it was. But I remember that I did fix it and I think it MAY have been through a command line fix. I'm kind of stuck here, because my computer crawls once I have a few applications running and it is my work computer.

02-23-2011, 11:58 AM

The problem I'm about to describe had happened to me about a year ago, but I can't remember what I did to fix it. I may have been a command-line fix.

My machine is the aluminum MacBook (non-Pro), 2.0. Yesterday I upgraded my HDD to a 500GB. Through Carbon Copy Cloner, I cloned my old hard drive. Once complete, I immediately updated Time Machine and made sure that all worked. All was good. Then, I did another restart. After opening Photoshop and a few other memory hogs, I noticed that the memory that was being used was WIRED. Usually the OS uses the wired memory and only takes up about 400MB. Applications should use mostly ACTIVE memory, since the active can be moved around and written to the HDD if necessary. So... before my upgrade, (with numerous applications open and running), wired memory was about 15% of my memory monitor. Active memory would be about 60% of my memory. Now, it is backwards.

Like I said, I ran into this about a year ago. I can't remember if it was when I had previously done a different HDD upgrade or it was 10.6 install or what it was. But I remember that I did fix it and I think it MAY have been through a command line fix. I'm kind of stuck here, because my computer crawls once I have a few applications running and it is my work computer.

02-23-2011, 12:00 PM

Maybe this article might help. Looks like the terminal command used might work for you. LINK

02-23-2011, 12:08 PM

Nope. That command is a temporary help, not a fix. My system seems to be managing memory usage wrongly. I'm not sure if it seems to not think that the new HDD is available for it to write virtual memory to it...? Also, once the memory gets used/filled, I am not seeing the amount of Page Outs that should be taking place during heavy Photoshop use.

02-23-2011, 01:43 PM

And do not cross post! You started one thread on the subject, continue posting to that one and don't start a new one.

02-23-2011, 02:24 PM

Problem solved. For some reason, there was no vm directory for Swap files to be written to. I created the directory and All is good.

02-23-2011, 02:37 PM

Glad you found the fix around and thanks for describing basically what WIRED and ACTIVE means in computer language. I have learnt something today and i thank you for that

For info like that and if i learn from it, rep is forthcoming

Cheers

02-23-2011, 06:49 PM

I'm not sure that what the OP had was a problem at all.
I think this is a great description of memory usage
What is free, wired, active, and inactive system memory (RAM)? | MacYourself