Problems from Insufficient RAM and Free Hard Disk Space
If your drive is too full or fragmented or you are having memory problems, you could see:
- applications slow to a crawl
- have problems installing
- experience frequent spinning beach balls
- have problems burning CDs
- have frequent unexplained freezes
Error message "Not enough memory"
In Entourage, for example, when you do a rebuild, Entourage makes a duplicate of your database. If your drive is full or fragmented you might be unable to rebuild. Your rebuild could also fail causing loss of data. Installing or updating Office could also fail due to either disk space or memory problems.
Simply checking how full your drive is does not take in consideration that the virtual memory system can use considerable space on your drive. Applications and processing on your Mac require physical RAM to work. Buy as much RAM as you can afford. It's the best present you can give your Mac. When you run out of RAM, virtual memory allows an operating system to escape the limitations of physical RAM by using hard disk storage to hold data not currently in use. This hard disk storage is sometimes called the “swap” space because of its use as storage for data being swapping in and out of memory. Using "swap" space can significantly slow down your Mac.
Check your Memory:
Use Apple's Activity Monitor to view memory usage. You can view Pagein/outs.
Pageins or pageouts are how many times a page of memory is swapped out from disk to memory and vice versa. If the total pageouts is low compared to the number of pageins after having used your Mac for hours of work, you may have sufficient RAM. Otherwise, you should install more RAM.
See Determine how much paging your system is performing and how to run the top command in the Terminal.
Third party software that can be used:
Check for hard drive space.
Your computer must have adequate hard drive space to operate normally. How full can a drive be before it's too full? There is no hard and fast rule that says xx amount of extra drive space is needed. Here are some general guidelines that have been posted:
- Check to make sure that your hard drive has at least 5% if not 10% of it's capacity available for use.
- You should have at *least* 500MB to 1GB of free space at all times.
- Swapfiles can eat up disk space quickly - 2GB or more of swap files is not unrealistic. Restarting will temporarily get rid of all swap files, but they'll come back.
To check how much free space is available on your startup disk:
- In Finder™, select your startup disk's icon. For most users, this is Macintosh HD.
- Press the Command-I keyboard combination.
- The Get Info window for your startup disk will open.
- In the General pane, the Capacity, Available (free space), and space Used on your startup disk will be displayed
Some handy links and tools on Mac OS X memory, paging, freeing up space etc.:
- Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk
- Free up Hard Disk space
- Disk Inventory X shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called "treemaps". freeware (Universal version available)
- WhatSize is a simple tool that allows the user to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. You would be surprised at how many useless files might be laying around on your hard disks. The files and folders are automatically sorted by size, with the biggest sizes first
- You also might want to consider iDefrag ($30): Defragmentation & Optimization for Mac OS X. It supports optimized defragging as well as simply (and quickly) joining free space into one continuous block. Also, it respects the system hot files. At $30
- Memory diagnostics
- RAM Usage
- Introduction to Memory Usage Performance Guidelines