9 GB Virtual memory (bit ridiculous ??)

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Level 3

525 points

9 GB Virtual memory (bit ridiculous ??)

i have been experiencing a slow down over the last couple of days, so today it was annoying me, looked in activity monitor and it reports that i have over 9 GB of virtual memory, which is over a third of my free space.

The main culprit is Hp Scanjet manager Currently at 2.3GB. Was wondering if a simple uninstall and reinstall should fix this or would the problem persist.

When i go to inspect the process the in the last three hours it has had a massive 82000 faults, goes up by the second thats like 10 faults a second, and there are a lot more big numbers on that page. i can actually see the virtual memory going up and up it does about 10mb every 30-40 seconds or so.

Anyway taking out this 2.3GB (if that can be solved) my virtual memory usage is still up at about 7 GB (still rather large).

Last fully shut down and restarted about 7 hours ago and have not been running anything special just itunes, safari, dashboard with about 4 widgets open, acrobat reader, text edit.

Rich

iMac G5 17 1.8ghz 1GB RAM AX, Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Posted on Nov 18, 2005 11:58 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 18, 2005 12:16 PM in response to Richard Moore

Hi Richard;

How about some additional information on exactly what you are running for hardware; what model of Mac, amount of RAM?

If you go to My Settings and enter this information in there it will be available for so we don't have ask for it again.

Allan

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Answer 2

Nov 18, 2005 12:18 PM in response to Richard Moore

It sounds like the HP scanjet manager has a memory leak.

I don't think virtual memory usage of 7 GB or even 9 GB is anything to worry about. What you should watch for is free and inactive being low:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

How much physical RAM do you have?

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Answer 3

Nov 18, 2005 12:22 PM in response to Richard Moore

How much RAM do you have?

I don't really think 9GB is a lot, though it could be a problem if you are tight on disk space. Right now, my VM size is at 11.3 GB up from 7.5GB prior to bringing up Dashboard, but that doesn't really seem to have any negative effect on performance.

Currently, no single process except the kernel_task has more than 325MB though, so there may be a problem with that Scanjet manager. I have HP all-in-one, but no Scanjet manager so you may want to verify that you have the latest drivers from HP.

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Answer 4

Richard Moore Author

Level 3

525 points

Nov 18, 2005 12:31 PM in response to Edwin Sneller

That information should be displayed as i have always had it entered since i joined (it was displayed before the recent update to the discussions) and it is also present when i am writing the posts

I have an iMac G5 rev A 1.8 GHz 17 inch superdrive with airport extreme, wireless keyboard and mouse, 80 Gb harddrive i have a 1 Gb of Ram this has always be aqueate (page outs usually less than 0.01% of page ins after a long period of operation). Running 10.4.3. Just restarted and the virtual memory was 4.4 Gb when started up but has risen sharply to 6.1 Gb in the time it has taken me to write this so about 2 mintues in total. Scanjet vm file is getting larger and larger. The scanner in quuestion is the HP Scanjet 3800 running through a usb hub.

Rich

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Answer 5

Nov 18, 2005 12:39 PM in response to Richard Moore

Yeah. For some reason the details of your computer didn't show up on your original post.

I'm gonna suggest doing something about the scanjet manager. Reinstall and then if that doesn't fix your performance problems delete it and see if that fixes things.

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Answer 6

Richard Moore Author

Level 3

525 points

Nov 19, 2005 5:18 PM in response to Edwin Sneller

well yesterday after a little while i decided to reinstall the entire operating system (bit extreme maybe) seeing as it was experiencing a slow down of the entire system. Things are a lot better now the scanjet manager is not present at all anymore (dunno why as i reinstalled the scanner). VM is up to around 5 GB but thanks to a previous poster not so worried about that any more. Maybe something went wrong in a system update or something but i do always have a back up and repair permissions reasonalby often (always before and after an update). Thanks for the advice.

Kind regards

Richard Moore

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Answer 7

chadseld

Level 1

10 points

Nov 20, 2005 2:03 PM in response to Richard Moore

Just so you know, the "VM size" number in Activity Viewer is not the same as the swap size on your disk. For example, my powerbook currently reports VM size = 8.57GB, but the actual size on disk (/var/vm) is apx 1GB.

Still sounds like your HP process is leaching your system though.

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Answer 8

Richard Moore Author

Level 3

525 points

Nov 20, 2005 4:51 PM in response to chadseld

i found i can kill the process with no adverse effects, the scanner will still initalise from any program i like when i like, the process comes up (starts increasing in size) i use it, then i can kill it. Bit annoying but a perfect work around.

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