evolve said:
This is what my mac is using right now, however I would like to know exactly what it all means. I have 1GB total RAM right now and am possibly thinking of upgrading. Thanks for your help.
Sort of short version:
wired: Memory which
must stay in resident memory. Basically the kernel and related code.
Active: Memory in active use right now by some application or process. This is not really true but the easier to grasp. Techinically active memory is memory that has recently been accessed.
Inactive: Memory that has not been recently accessed. This is kept in resident memory to reduce the need for paging. It will also be the first thing paged should memory need to be freed.
Used: Wired+Active+Inacitve
Free: Uh.... free memory.
VM Size: The amount of virtual memory space that has been allocated for all running processes.
Page Ins: Number of reads from disk into memory. Safe to ignore for the most part.
Page outs: How many writes from memory to disk. If this number increases rapidly or continually (i.e. disk thrashing) then you have a problem. You are not close to that though. You have plenty of free memory and a significant amount of inactive.
If you added more memory it would allow more stuff to sit in inactive memory, thus reducing page outs, but I doubt you would see much of a performance boost based on those numbers.
EDIT: Too slow.