What are Page Ins?

Don't worry about page ins. It's page outs and swap used that matter and determine if you need more RAM. You want page outs to be zero or a very low number. Zero is really the best. You are fine.

Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1342

If an application calls a page and it is in the RAM, then it is a "page in" occurs. If an app calls for a page from memory, and that page is currently stored on the hard disk and has to be read back into the RAM, then a "Page Out" occurs.

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/47648-page-ins-page-outs-c ould-somebody-please-explain-me-idiot-fashion.html

This may help as a general guide to to using Activity Monitor to decide if you need more RAM.

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/os-x-memory-usage.htm

But briefly, Page in good, Page out bad.

However, Page Out does not have to be zero, and using zero as a goal is likely to just force you to spend cash on RAM that is hardly ever used.

Tom

http://macs.about.com

I jist found out about the page ins and outs and appreciate this info, but I remember when pcs were still using DOS they did something similar. On a 286 windows floated above dos but the system still used dos.

I remeber that Dos could only address about one mg of memorey and if you bought more it was never used because windows would swap in and out what was I believed were called packets.

So this is the same concept but at least all the memorey is addressable.

I checked my page ins and outs and the ratio was fine. However I noticed that my free ram is dipping down to 100 meg. When I bought my Imac I odered it with 4GB but there was an error and it only came with 2GB so I geuss it's time to upgrade.

Thanks to everyone for this quick explaination of page ins and outs and how to use the activity monitor.