I am trying to watch an Adobe Instruction video and it is buffering. Is this from low memory? If so, where do I look up what amount of memory I have left? How much memory should I have to prevent buffering?
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Probably not a memory issue but Flash.
Open System Preferences > Flash Player then select the Advanced tab.
Then click: Delete All under Browsing Data & Seettings.
Quit then relaunch your browser then try the video again.
If that doesn't help, make sure Flash is up to date.
Back to System Preferences > Flash Player then select the Updates tab then click Check Now.
It can also be your internet connection. If you share it with other members of your household, or you are doing on-line backups, or uploading photos to a image saving service (iCloud, Flickr, Dropbox, etc...), your router may have the up-link saturated such that your streaming cannot get Acks back to the server.
You can monitor your computer's RAM use by opening Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.
Thanks, but I don't share any of these.
Thanks Eric. Is there some way to increase my memory with my "virtual memory"?
As far as I know, the OS controls that. Since your memory pressure is green you are okay, but you can add RAM if you want.
The 2 places I’ve seen recommended most to buy reliable RAM are below. I have purchased RAM several times from Other World Computing and have always been very satisfied with the product and service. They have on-line instructions on how to replace the RAM. OWC has also tested RAM above what Apple states is the maximum. I now have 6GB installed on a early 2008 iMac supposedly limited to 4 GB and noticed an improvement.
Thank you so much. I noticed that I had copied the wrong thing. I went to "Memory" on my Activity Monitor and it looks like I am out of memory. See below. What is Virtual Memory for?
Virtual Memory is how operating systems take random physical pages (4096 bytes/page for a Mac) and make them look like contiguous memory for the application.
It is possible to have virtual memory page tables, that when adding up all the page slots in the tables, would exceed the available RAM. The operating system can get away with this by not putting the address of a real page of RAM in some virtual memory page table slots, and when the application attempts to access one of those pages, the operating system gets an interrupt notification, and it can juggle somethings around and put a page there, and fill it with the instructions or data the application expects.
The instructions or data that would get put into a page may come from the program instructions stored in the applications executable files, or it may have been written to a "Swap" file.
Since you have used 0 bytes of swap, you are not spending time writing pages to the swap before a page can be freed up for use by another application. This is good, as it tends to indicate that your Mac is doing rather good with respect to memory.
If you really think your streaming problems are RAM related, then quit everything else, and close all other Browser tabs and windows when you are streaming and see if your buffering problems still occur.
Thanks for the answer (which I didn't understand). I guess this means that I can't use the Virtual Memory for additional memory. I still don't understand why I have 8 GB of memory and can only use 4 GB. If I buy an additional 8GB (2 x 4GB), will I get to use that 8 GB for memory or will 4GB of it be used for something else?
Sorry for sounding so Mac-illiterate, but that is just what I am. So, pls answer me the same as you would your 4 year old daughter.
Very unlikely to be your RAM, most likely is your connection to the server providing it, what is your internet speed?
That is probably it. Since we don't upload often, we had Cox lower the speed. Thanks
Lower the upload, download or both?
gailrooney wrote:
Thanks for the answer (which I didn't understand). I guess this means that I can't use the Virtual Memory for additional memory. I still don't understand why I have 8 GB of memory and can only use 4 GB. If I buy an additional 8GB (2 x 4GB), will I get to use that 8 GB for memory or will 4GB of it be used for something else?
Sorry for sounding so Mac-illiterate, but that is just what I am. So, pls answer me the same as you would your 4 year old daughter.
The Mac is ONLY seeing 4GB of physical memory. If you think you have 8GB, then either you are mistaken, or the 2nd memory card is not properly seated in its slot, or it is seriously broken.
The menu bar Apple icon (upper left corner) -> About this Mac will tell you how much RAM your Mac thinks is installed.
But really, Activity Monitor "Physical Memory" value of 4GB is basically telling you the same thing as "About this Mac" will tell you.
However, based on your Activity Monitor numbers, I do not think you have a Memory problem, assuming you are captured Activity Monitor screen shots when you were experiencing Streaming Buffering.
Green in the Activity Monitor -> Memory display means the Mac is doing very nicely. WHen it is Yellow, it means the Mac is starting to stress over memory. When it is Red, the Mac is starting to use the disk drive (a slow device) to compensate for too little memory. You are Green.
NOTE: Do NOT assume that 3.50GB used out of 4GB means you are out of memory. OS X will attempt to use as much memory as it can to improve performance. If the applications do not need all the memory, then OS X will use memory to cache file system data to avoid going to the slow disk if possible.
An online video is buffering. Is this from lack of memory?
